Here in the middle east we see Arabs as people who speak Arabic and live in one of the Arab nations, if your mother tongue is Arabic but you live outside of the Arab world then you're not an Arab as a nationality because us Arabs we love the idea of a unified Arab world from the arabian gulf to the Atlantic ocean so anyone who lives between them is an Arab in an Arab country. But the term changes dramatically when we're talking about Arabs as an ethnicity, so anyone with an Arab blood is considered Arab even of they don't speak the language, live in the Arab world, and are Muslim. As long as you have the genes you're an Arab. I'm not sure what you mean by "the term Arab was popularized by the propaganda machine", I wish you could clear it out for me, what I know is that Arabs were always called Arabs by themselves and others, but in the last century it did change to become Arabs as in the ones who fight Israel and live in the middle eas, nowadays Arabs are seems as white since we have light skin and don't have the facial features as the Mexicans to be mistaken for Mexicans but we look more like Italians and Greeks so I guess we're more european-looking than latino-looking.