"What's any of this got to do with the price of rice?  We're talking about crude, vulgar racial slurs.  Osama bin Laden and Prince Bandar are as black as a whole lot of African-Americans are.  And you can bet the same ignorant, redneck GIs who went to Iraq during Desert Storm and called the Afro-Semitic types they came across ""sand niggers"" would use that term to refer to Bandar and bin Laden, too.  And it doesn't matter one whit to a bunch of rednecks from Kansas (or wherever) what North Africans consider themselves.  And, no.  They don't consider themselves ""white""/European; they simply consider don't consider themselves black.  They are Semitic or Arab and recognize themselves as such.  Further, the religious schism between that part of the world and the West further encourages them to make that distinction  in addition to their bloodlines.   

 "