Dogwash

A brace of toerags has been convicted of the murder of a "vulnerable" man in Lincoln. Now these two aresholes seem to be a fairly bog-standard pair of violent estate chavs who also happened to like channelling their surplus energies into a bit of football hooliganism. This latter association provides the Lincolnshire Echo with the opportunity to give their story a bit of a slant. The Echo article (including the headline) begins:

Killers were known to police for links to far-right group and football violence

Two murderers of a vulnerable Lincoln man had links to the far-right English Defence League, according to police.

Daryll Jones, 17, and Mark Jackson, 21, were two of the top targets in Lincolnshire Police's attempts to ban people from the Sincil Bank area on Lincoln City match days.

They were identified by football intelligence officers along with ten others in Operation Argyll.

As reported in the Echo, this operation aims to use civil football banning orders to stop people hanging around with suspected troublemakers.

But the cases against Jones and Jackson, of Yarborough Road, Lincoln, were put on hold after they were arrested on suspicion of killing football enthusiast Shaun Rossington.

Asperger’s sufferer Shaun, 21, of Dunkirk Road, was found to have suffered more than 40 injuries. He was punched, kicked and stamped on during the attack on grassland, off Searby Road, on June 3.

"... links to the far-right English Defence league ..."

So where does this come from? Further down the piece, we read:

Lincolnshire Police football intelligence officer PC Karl Williams said:

[...]

"We started to get information on these two every time Lincoln City had a game and there were some indications they were connected to the English Defence League."

Hmm, a bit tendentious, that. We've gone from the policeman's tentative "some indications" to the reporter's definite "had links to". And the latter is in the opening sentence; a fair number of readers will skim the headline and the first few sentences before moving on.

The report is now picked up by the fragrant Nick Lowles at Hate Not Hope, who blogs:

Killers were EDL supporters

Day by day the true nature of the English Defence League is becoming clearer. Alongside fascists, racists, drug dealers and football hooligans we now have murderers.

It has been reported that two of the murderers of a vulnerable Lincoln man had links to the English Defence League.

Daryll Jones, 17, and Mark Jackson, 21, were also two known football hooligans and the target of a police operation to ban troublemakers linked to Lincoln City FC..

Jones and Jackson, of Yarborough Road, Lincoln, were convicted of killing football enthusiast and Asperger's sufferer Shaun Rossington. The victim, who suffered from Aspergers, was kicked and beaten to death in June. He suffered more than 40 separate injuries in the attack.

This is just the latest criminality linked to followers of the EDL and says much about the organisation.

Note how the murder and the tentative suspicion of a "link to the EDL" have now become centrally associated. Note how Lowles boldly generalizes from this tenuous association — a couple of individuals who might or might not have been sympathetic to the aims of the EDL — to a broad and assertive slur against the EDL as a whole. All EDLers, he seems to imply, are barely-restrained fascists, racists, drug dealers, thugs and murderers.

So let's see if I've got the hang of this then, Nick. If a couple of "Asians" in Oldham are sent down for grooming and pimping underage White schoolgirls, then I can assume that all "Asians" are pædophiles and pimps, can I?

I wonder what the police officer's "some indications" actually were. Saw one of them in a cast-off EDL-branded hoodie perchance? Which he'd probably nicked anyway.

Amazing what you can achieve with a spot of barefaced spin, innit.