[CondorFlight]

Actually, a lot of North Africans think of themselves as Berbers, and not Arabs; the Arabs were their conquerors and not their liberators.

The natural home of the Arabs is in Arabia, not N. Africa.

(Khaddafi of Libya recently said he was a Berber.)

[magua]

The arabs have the cities and the Berbers have the county side and mountains.

[blam]

"(Khaddafi of Libya recently said he was a Berber.)"

The incidence of red-hair in Libya is the same as it is in Ireland.

[Minus_The_Bear]

True. Most peoples of the middle east and N. Africa were slaughtered and totally wiped out by Mulsim invaders. The Berbers were independent and had no love for Islam and would not convert which led to outright war. No TRUE Berbers remain today. Islam destroyed untold numbers of similar people groups. Bat Yeor has written on this extensively.

[Cronos]

The natural home of the Arabs is in Arabia, not N. Africa.

Actually, it's even smaller than that -- you can limit it to what is now Saudi Arabia. Syrians are Aramaics, Iraqis and Kuwaitis are Babylonians/Assyrians, the states of Qatar, Bahrain, the UAE on the northern coasts have strong Persian influences going back millenia, Yemen was part of the Ethiopian empire (and Christian) for at least 1000 years before Mohammad, and Oman has a different tradition from the Bedouins.