The Sunday Times Magazine features a lengthy report by Camilla Long on the English Defence League. The pitch is that it’s a study of the EDL after the loss of its old leadership, but most of the research was evidently carried out before the recent departure of Stephen Lennon and Kevin Carroll.

You do get a sense of the drunken racism and far-right views underpinning EDL protests, which the author clearly finds repellent. But the article is written by someone who doesn’t know a lot about the subject (Long is an interviewer and film critic). The original stated aim of the EDL may have been to “oppose the practices and effects of Islamic extremism”, but it very quickly revealed itself as a movement that was openly directed against Islam as a whole – and, by extension, against the entire Muslim community.

Long also gives some credence to the EDL’s Islamophobia, which is depicted as having some basis in reality. We’re told: “Nearly everyone in the EDL lives in what they describe as Muslim ghettos, places of no money and broken schools, where white people are the object of religious hate.” Not only that, but in Islam “there is some uncertainty on the matter of underage sex”.

There’s even a spin-off article by Long in the Sunday Times itself, based on an interview with an individual named Martin Sculpher that she did for the magazine feature, entitled “Hero of 7/7 bombings joins English Defence League”. Readers are told: “He denied that the EDL incited racial hatred and blamed ‘the media interpretation of what we are. From the start we have opposed radical Islam’, he said. ‘It is not racist to challenge a radical ideology of Islam.'”

I’ve reproduced Long’s Sunday Times Magazine article here for information, because it’s hidden behind Murdoch’s paywall.

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A man from Salford has pleaded guilty to scrawling graffiti about Fusilier Lee Rigby’s murder on the RAF Bomber Command War Memorial.

Daniel James Smith, 21, of Grecian Street North, Salford, admitted writing “Lee Rigby’s killers should hang” on the memorial in central London on June 5 – a monument he did not realise was a war memorial.

Colleen Gildernew, defending, said: “He had no idea that the war memorial was a war memorial. He is very disgusted with himself, even more so because of that.”

Smith also daubed “EDL” and “F*** the police” on the memorial in Green Park, prosecutor Izolda Switala-Gribbin said.

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