The history of Phoenicians and Carthaginians was brief in Italy as they set up trading posts in Sicily, hardly all of Italy. They were not even Arab...they were Punic (who descend from Cypriot tribes). The Arabs were not even present in North Africa during the Carthaginian raids. In 700 AD, when Arab Muslims swept through Northern Africa is when an Arab presence reached Africa. Italians in effect are basically a mixture of Greek (particularly the south), Roman, Italic tribes, Germanic, Frankish, Celtic, Catalan (Spaniard), and Norman peoples, not to mention the tens of thousands of Albanian/Illyrian/Slavic peoples who entered Italy in the Middle Ages and settled Calabria, Sicily, including Basilicata, and Campania, when the Ottomans overran the Balkan peninsula whose communities still exist in Italy and are known as Aberesche.
To say that universally, every Italian has North African/Middle Eastern is gross overstatement. I don’t understand how an Italian person stating that he has Germanic, Celtic, Norman, Albanian, Roman, and Greek distant ancestors is denying his Italianisms, considering that all these make up his Italian ancestry. As you rightly put it, it's time to be Italian, so could you follow that as well.
I have been to France, Belgium, Poland, Switzerland, Austria, Croatia, and they greet the same with a hand shake and kiss, so that argument is baseless. What you have to understand is that there are dark people in every European country as well pasty-white peoples, but we should not use that as a ground for stupid 19th century stereotypes of European peoples. Italians shares things in common with fellow southern Europeans including minor import/export customs with northern Europe and North Africa. No one here is trying to prove which race/ethnicity is better than the other (considering that Europeans, North Africans and Middle Easterners are all Caucasian in race), but it is pointless to bring these outdated arguments of complexion, race, and religion up. You may not be racist, but you are bias in terms of religion considering that you wrote that we should not be ashamed of our heritage because these Arabs were not Muslim yet.
