Why do people say Egyptians were Semites when thaey said they were not?

Yes the language is a Semitic language. Semetic relating to or denoting a family of languages that includes Hebrew, Arabic, and Aramaic and certain ancient languages such as Phoenician and Akkadian, constituting the main subgroup of the Afro-Asiatic family. The historical languages include the Egyptian languages (also known as Copto-Egyptian) consisting of ancient Egyptian and Coptic, and form a separate branch among the family of Afro-Asiatic languages.