Were Jesus and the ancient Semites Black?

"This book attempts to provide a short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years."

--author, Jared Diamond.

In Jared Diamond's book, Guns, Germs, and Steel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author and UCLA professor of geography and physiology states:

“We instinctively associate Semitic peoples with the Near East. However, . . . Semitic languages really form only one of six or more branches of a much larger language family, Afro-asiatic, all of whose other branches (and other 222 surviving languages) are confined to Africa.

Even the Semitic family subfamily itself is mainly African, 12 of its 19 surviving languages being confined to Ethiopia. This suggests that Afroasiatic languages arose in Africa, and that only one branch of them spread to the Near East. Hence, it may have been Africa that gave birth to the languages spoken by the authors of the Old and New Testaments and the Koran, the moral pillars of Western civilization.”

What do you think?