36-year-old Christopher Khamis Victor Husary is in jail for allegedly stealing two counterprotesters’ Israeli flags and setting one of them on fire at a January El Cerrito protest, and now faces arson, grand theft, robbery, and hate crime charges.

It is bound to invite some unflattering comparisons if you schedule a protest on the infamous date of January 6. But there was a pro-Palestine protest on that date this year in El Cerrito (seen below), and according to a release from the El Cerrito Police Department, the demonstrators “took over the intersection of San Pablo Avenue and Carlson Boulevard for over an hour.” Meanwhile, several counterprotesters stood on the sidewalk and waved Israeli flags.

And that was literally a combustible combination. The department added in an updated release two days later that “A male protester pushed a woman down to the ground from behind, causing a minor injury, and took her Israel flag from her hands by force.” The release added that “He then burned the flag in the street,” and the department said they were investigating this as a hate crime.

One of those counterprotesters spoke with KPIX in the segment above. "I was very shaken. I'm still shaken by it," she told the station. "They rushed over to us, again, blocking us, and they started to grab our flags and our signs."

Now according to the Bay Area News Group, police arrested 36-year-old Christopher Khamis Victor Husary of Hayward on February 28. And last week, Contra Costa County prosecutors charged Husary with arson, grand theft, robbery, and a hate crime enhancement. The charging document alleges Husary took two counterprotesters’ Israeli flags.

“While the First Amendment is fundamental to our democracy, it doesn’t protect threats, injury, intimidation, or property damage,” the county’s DA Diana Becton said in a statement. “Moreover, when such actions stem from biases related to race, gender, religion, ancestry, or national origin, they become hate crimes."

Husary remains in custody at the Martinez Detention Facility, with bond set at $250,000 bond.

Related: Anti-Jewish Graffiti Appears on Market Street Following Pro-Palestinian March [SFist]

Image: El Cerrito Police Department

A protester who was assaulted after an APEC demonstration claims the attack was the work of Chinese government “thugs,” and a couple members of Congress find the claim credible enough that they’re calling for an investigation.

That whole APEC Summit hullabaloo wrapped up nearly a month ago. But on Tuesday of this week, a Chinese dissident who recently emigrated to California showed evidence he was beaten up after protesting the Chinese government during APEC. And an Associated Press report says that he and multiple organizations claim the Chinese government coordinated attacks on U.S. protesters. They offered no real evidence of this claim, though the FBI has charged Chinese government operatives for doing this in the past.

We certainly have evidence that the victim, 51-year-old Kaiyu Zhang, was beaten in an attack in South San Francisco. As seen in the video above, he and another man (identified only as “Mr. Chau”) were indeed tackled and beaten by a group of Asian men, most of them wearing black, and a couple with armbands. And clearly Zhang was beaten badly enough that he was hospitalized, reportedly overnight.

At a Tuesday press conference by the group Human Rights in China, Zhang said he was “ambushed and assaulted by Pro-CCP thugs in San Francisco airport.” CCP refers to the Chinese Communist Party.

“I thought we were safe in America and should not succumb to any CCP intimidation,” he continued. “So I responded with ‘Fuck CCP’ (and) ‘Fuck Xi Jin Ping.’ These words were not aimed at any of these young men. But strangely they were agitated by these anti-CCP words and immediately speeded up and rushed to us. I was tackled down and was brutally beaten up. I lost consciousness very soon. After the assault, Mr. Chau and I were sent to the hospital and I stayed in the ER until the following day.”

The incident has caught the attention of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), a bipartisan group of Washington, DC lawmakers. A separate AP report says they allege that the attackers “may have ties to the Chinese consulate in San Francisco.”

“We, the Chairs of the CECC, strongly condemn the reported violence perpetrated against individuals exercising their rights of freedom of expression and assembly in the United States,” they said in a late November statement. “We urge San Francisco County police to review these reports and pursue justice as appropriate.”

Except this did not happen in San Francisco — it seems to  have happened in South San Francisco. But there is clearly an effort to conflate it with San Francisco, to whip up anti-SF sentiment. South San Francisco police say they are investigating the assault and battery, but haven't made any arrests as of yet.

That said, it is a real thing that the Chinese government has been shown to have surrogates who violently engage with anti-Chinese protesters in other countries, a practice the FBI calls “transnational repression.” But New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith is taking it a step further, claiming that the SF Police Department is taking orders from the Chinese government to allow anti-Chinese protesters to be beaten.

"They stood down and they were ordered. I have no doubt about it in my mind," Smith told the AP.

With all due respect… this jackass, who lives 3,000 miles away and may have never even set foot in San Francisco for all we know, is now saying SFPD is secretly in cahoots with the Chinese government.

The anti-CCP protesters also claim a series of other attacks, none of which are documented. For their part, the Chinese embassy in SF makes the wholly undocumented claim that their own demonstrators were “knocked out, others were beaten to headaches and nose bleeding, still others got hurt at sternums and ribs" in a statement reported by the AP.

It’s difficult to know who to trust here, if anyone. The Chinese government certainly has a horrendous record on human rights, and has meddled with anti-CCP protests in the past. Many U.S. opponents of the Chinese government (the people who give us Shen Yun and Falun Gong), have repeatedly been shown to be misinformation hucksters themselves.

This may just be a random attack, or who knows, maybe the highest levels of the Chinese government were secretly involved or something. It’s more likely that protesters and counter-protesters just got too violent with each other, which happened a couple times during APEC. But law enforcement will investigate these matters, and the PR machines on both sides will try to spin the attacks as them being the victims of large-scale conspiracies.

Related: Man Identified as APEC Volunteer Allegedly Punches Protester as Demonstrations Get More Hostile [SFist]

Image: @KaiyuZhang89 via Twitter

Thanks to loyal SFist contributing photog Steve Rhodes, we have these pictures of the sizable protest that went down in Union Square last night, in which activists, Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi and local Iranian-Americans gathered to voice their support for the post-election protests in Tehran and to ask President Obama to support reform leader Mir Hussein Moussavi.

PREVIOUSLY: Ask SFist: Iranian Election Stuff?

OK, listen up! For all those who believe in marriage equality, and even for those who just love a good protest march, DayOfDecision.org has all the details about protests planned for tonight in San Francisco following on the CA Supreme Court's ruling to uphold Prop 8.

The upshot:

5 p.m., Rally at City Hall.
6 p.m., March from City Hall to MLK Memorial at Yerba Buena Gardens
7 p.m. - 8:30 p.m., Post-March gathering at Yerba Buena Gardens

Live updates on Twitter here, and if we had to guess, an unsanctioned breakout march toward the Castro seems inevitable.

SF Weekly has a slideshow of pics from yesterday's theatrical Greenpeace demonstration, where the basic idea was "fossil fuels are from the stone age." We think some of the participants took their slogan ideas straight from the org's national website instead of coming up with them themselves if only because one of them said, "Solar Power the Sears Tower," which, uh, might benefit from more of a local spin.