Others have shown how the EDL is stuffed full of ex-British National Party members or odd ball neo-Nazis, but we shouldn’t forget how their members like violence.
EDLers like fantasizing about attacking ethnic minorities as their entries on Facebook show.
More recently, at least two of their followers were involved in a racial attack as the Sunderland Echo reports:
“TWO former English Defence League members are beginning year-long jail sentences after racist attacks at a mosque and two Asian-run businesses.
Steven James Vasey and Anthony Donald Smith launched their offensive after incidents at a war memorial in Luton on Armistice Day last November, where poppies were burnt by extreme Islamic groups.
On the eve of Muslim festival Eid, the masked men, along with an accomplice, climbed a fence at the Nasir mosque in Hartlepool.
The letters “EDL” and “NEI”, for the North East Infidels, were sprayed along with “no surrender” and images of poppies and the St George flag.
Prosecutor Chris Baker told Durham Crown Court that a taxi seen in the area at the time was similar to a vehicle spotted later in Potto Street in Shotton Colliery, where an upstairs window of the Milco store was smashed with a brick.
Similar graffiti to that left on the mosque was sprayed on the shop and the nearby Albert Guest House, which are both owned by an Asian businessman.
Mr Baker told Recorder William Lowe there was an irony that the store was selling poppies when the attack was carried out.
He said taxi driver Smith, 24, of Rydale Court, Trimdon, previously of Neptune Way, Easington Colliery, was arrested the next day.
Messages on his mobile showed planning with then-girlfriend Charlotte Christina Davies and Vasey and included claims they were going “Muzzy bashing” and were going to give the mosque a “makeover”. “