A Jewish school on the Tunisian island of Djerba, home to one of North Africa's ancient indigenous Jewish communities, was attacked Jan. 9 as anti-government protests raged elsewhere around the country. Petrol bombs hurled at the school caused property damage but no injuries, the head of the local Jewish community, Perez Trabelsi, told Reuters. Trabelsi suggested the assailants exploited the fact that there was a reduced security presence in Djerba, as police were occupied elsewhere repressing anti-austerity protests. "Unknown people took the opportunity of the protests and threw Molotov cocktails into the lobby of a Jewish religious school in Djerba," he said. (Haaretz)

A wave of protests across Iranian cities began as a response to inflation and economic pain, but shows signs of escalating to a popular repudiation of clerical rule. Spontaneous protests first broke out Dec. 28 in the northeast city of Mashhad, where security forces responded with tear-gas and water cannons. Since then, protests have been reported from Kermanshah and Hamadan in the west, Rasht and Sari in the north, Ahvaz in the southwest, and Qom and Isfahan in central Iran. Arrests are also reported from the capital, Tehran, where a group of demonstrators attempted to occupy a public square. Protests began with the slogan "Death to high prices!" But as repression mounted, demonstrators began chanting "Death to the dictator," in apparent reference to President Hassan Rouhani and the ruling mullahs.

Argentine Judge Carlos Bonadio ordered (PDF) the arrest of current senator and former president Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner on Dec. 7 for her possible involvement in a cover-up of Iran's participation in the 1994 bombing of a Buenos Aires Jewish center that left 85 people dead. Kirchner served as president of Argentina from 2007 to 2015 before being elected senator. During that time, Kirchner is alleged to have signed a deal with the Iranian government that would allow for Argentine magistrates to interview the officials suspected of ordering the attack in Tehran rather than in Buenos Aires, in an attempt to impede the investigation. For this, Kirchner faces a charge of treason. The crime of treason is punishable by 10 to 25 years in prison in Argentina.

Valerie Plame, an ex-spook beloved by the left, got in hot water when she tweeted an article by fellow ex-spook beloved by the (far) right Philip Giraldi with the lovely title "America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars." In the subsequent outrage, The American Conservative finally gave Giraldi the sack. But Giraldi's Judeophobia seems not to bother others. He continues to have Unz Review for a platform, and they love him over at the (conspiranoid-right) Veterans Today. And the Council for the National Interest predictably continues to embrace Giraldi as their executive director. This outfit, fronted by our nemesis Alison Weir, is just what its name sounds like—a beltway body of paleocon right-nationalists paranoid about Jewish subversion.

A Moscow district court rejected a lawsuit Sept. 18 filed by a relative of Raoul Wallenberg, seeking to access uncensored documents concerning Wallenberg's death in Soviet captivity. Wallenberg was a Swedish diplomat who is said to have rescued thousands of Hungarian Jews during World War II. Soviet forces detained Wallenberg in 1945, supposedly for espionage, and placed him in Moscow's Lubyanka Prison (then part of the headquarters complex of NKVD, later the KGB). The USSR released a document in 1954 saying Wallenberg died in Lubyanka of heart failure in 1947. The actual cause of Wallenberg's death is still a matter of speculation. Wallenberg's niece, Marie Dupuy, filed the lawsuit against the KGB successor organization, the Federal Security Service (FSB), requesting documents that would shed light on the circumstances surrounding his death.

Japan's northernmost main island of Hokkaido seems, unfortunately, poised to jump into the headlines as East Asia's next flashpoint for Great Power confrontation. When North Korea fired a missile over Japan last month, it was this northern island that the rocket passed over. Buried deep in the New York Times account of the incident is the fact that in addition to the routine annual US-South Korean military exercises then underway along the DMZ, "The United States has also been conducting joint exercises with Japanese forces for the past two weeks." And specifically (the Times didn't note) on Hokkaido. The Diplomat informs us that the exercises were dubbed Northern Viper and involved Japan Self-Defense Forces troops and US Marines operating out of Misawa Air Base, the northernmost US base in Japan, just across Tsugaru Strait from Hokkaido on the northern tip of Honshu. The USMC boasts that the exercises were unprecedented, marking the first joint US-Japanese maneuvers on Hokkaido.

Well, here we are. There are real live Nazis marching in streets, with torches and swastikas, terrorizing those who stand to oppose them. It’s the 1930s again, but this time in the USA. What do we do about it? This question has taken a greater urgency since this past weekend's events in Berkeley, in which "antifa" counter-protesters mixed it up physically with "alt-right" protesters. Since then, there been a slew of headlines such as "Black-clad antifa members attack peaceful right-wing demonstrators in Berkeley" (WaPo), "Violence by far-left protesters in Berkeley sparks alarm" (LAT), "Yes, antifa is the moral equivalent of neo-Nazis" (WaPo), "ADL Tells Cops to Infiltrate Antifa" (The Forward), "The Antifa Protests are Helping Donald Trump" (New Yorker), and so on. The anarchist think-tank CrimethInc suggests the media reports are distorted, omitting provocation by the right-wing protesters that sparked the violence, while Mother Jones protests that the media have given undue coverage to the brief clashes, obscuring what was an overwhelmingly peaceful mobilization. Politico ominously reports that the FBI and Homeland Security are now refering to antifa as "terrorists."

The "Unite the Right" rally in Charlottesville—which brought out open neo-Nazis, Klansmen and Confederacy-nostalgists over the city's plan to remove a statue of Robert E Lee—escalated to open terror when one attendee ploughed his car into a throng of anti-racist counter-protesters, leaving one dead and 19 injured. Five are in critical condition. The deceased is identified as Heather Heyer, 32, a Virginia resident and longtime civil rights activist. The motorist, who has been arrested and charged with second-degree murder (why not first-degree?) and leaving the scene of an "accident" (sic!), is identified as James Alex Fields, 20, of Ohio. (Why always three names for these freaks?) He was earlier photographed at the rally by the Daily News bearing a shield with the black-and-white fascist insignia of the Vanguard America hate group (which we discussed here).