Lebanon’s Daily Star says that Arabs and Muslims are feeling quite welcome at the Democratic National Convention: Muslim Democrats hopeful but wary. (Hat tip: Beagle.)

NEW YORK: Maya Berry remembers a time when, as an Arab-American delegate to the 1992 Democratic convention, she held aloft a placard that read - “Palestinian Self-Determination” - and was trailed by security guards bearing walkie-talkies for her troubles. That incident came at a time when Arab-Americans were struggling to get onto the political map.

“To be frank, I felt fairly unwelcome,” recalls Berry, a Michigan delegate to this week’s Democratic convention in Boston, Massachusetts. “And now it’s like night and day. The Democratic Party organizes around ethnic constituencies and we’ve become part of that coalition.”

With issues like Iraq and civil liberties at the heart of the Democrats’ critique of the Bush administration, and even a formal recognition of the right of Palestinians to a state in the party platform, Berry and the over 70 other Arab and Muslim delegates (out of 4,300-plus) at the convention feel slightly more at home than in the past.

“Our issues are the national issues when it comes to the presidential race for the first time ever,” says Berry. “Now everybody’s talking about Iraq, everybody’s talking about the Patriot Act, everybody’s talking about the Palestinian-Israeli problem.”

So now we know that Hizballah is rooting for Kerry-Edwards.

But it’s nice to see the government-controlled newspaper of an Arab dictatorship (occupied by a terror-sponsoring rogue state, Syria) so concerned about civil liberties.