[umanwizard]

> aren't middle-eastern Muslims generally considered Semites as in descendants of Shem?

This has the same energy as “technically Elon Musk is African-American”.

Sometimes words have come to mean something specific that doesn’t precisely correspond to their literal components or etymology, and pretending not to understand this just impedes communication.

[fencepost]

Connotation vs denotation indeed.

But I'll stick by my position that for a lot of people feeling put-upon it's because they're generally unpleasant not because of their ethnic, religious or other background but because of their personalities.

Personally, I'd call the current Israeli government one of the "sovereign citizens" of the world - and while there's a certain "duh" element to that because indeed nations are sovereign, the connotation I'm trying to get at here is that they have the same "doesn't play well with others" energy of the US 'sovcits'