‘You can see their fingerprints all over the statements released by the families of victims”
When a Libyan Muslim terrorist carried out the horrifying Manchester Arena attack targeting young children, the media quickly began running a hoax story that a Muslim homeless man had been helping save people.
(It turned out he was actually robbing them.)
Where did the story come from? How do these counter-narratives emerge so quickly and in such an organized fashion after Islamic terrorist attacks in such a consistent fashion (“he was mentally ill” “actually, Muslims were the real rescuers in the attack”)… at least in the UK, there may be an answer.
The name of the secretive Government propaganda unit trying to manipulate events makes it sound like an innocuous back-office operation – the Research, Information and Communications Unit, or RICU.
The 22-strong unit was established in 2007 by the late Charles Farr, a former MI6 officer, as part of the Prevent counter-terrorism strategy.
Modelled on the Information Research Department (IRD), a propaganda unit established by the Attlee government in 1948 to blacken the names of communists and other political opponents, RICU operates out of the Home Office’s Westminster headquarters.
When the mobs took to the streets of Northern Ireland last week following the stabbing of Stephen Ogilvie, allegedly by Hadi Alodid, a 30-year-old Sudanese asylum-seeker, RICU swung into action to advise the police in the province on how to ‘control the narrative’.
What does that entail? When you see a statement from the family of a victim disavowing any anger or protests, it’s apparently coming out of RICU.
It has also been claimed that the unit intervenes to write statements by the families of victims of potentially racially linked incidents to stop them from inflaming tensions further with their remarks.
The source said: ‘You can see their fingerprints all over the statements released by the families of victims in these volatile situations – they usually have a similar tone.’
It has a long history of ‘covertly engineering’, in the words of one expert, ‘the thoughts of people’ at times of crisis, being quick to spring into action after terrorist incidents such as the London Bridge attacks in 2017. Eight people died when a van was driven into pedestrians on London Bridge and the three occupants ran to a nearby market and began stabbing people.
A team in an unmarked van is also understood to have toured the area plastering the walls with posters bearing hashtags such as #TurnToLove, #ForLondon and #LoveWillWin.
Similarly, after the British aid worker Alan Henning was decapitated by Islamic State in Syria in 2014, RICU used a specially created ‘front operation’ to plant an image of a woman in a Union Jack hijab in the media.
In June 2017, Darren Osborne, a recent convert to far-Right ideology, drove a white van into a crowd of pedestrians close to Finsbury Park mosque in north London, killing one person and injuring ten. Reports at the time said that Osborne had been held down and beaten by people at the scene, until an imam appealed to them to stop.
It later emerged that the reports about the peace-making imam had originated after journalists were approached at the police cordon by a woman called ‘Gabbie’, who said she worked for a company called ‘Horizon PR’ and offered to introduce them to a third party who ‘stressed to the journalists the role that the mosque’s imam had played in protecting Osborne until he could be handed over to police’.
The story was the work of an agency called Breakthrough Media – which had been paid by RICU.
The unit’s fingerprints were also all over the hashtag #WeStandTogether which appeared on Twitter afterwards and was shared by prominent politicians, police commanders and the London Fire Brigade.
So there’s a unit of the government that pushes post-attack propaganda, some of which consists of actual lies, pressures family members into releasing statements, and all of this Black Mirror stuff is kept secret.
But it’s not just the UK.
There were serious questions about the role of a DOJ unit known as the Community Relations Service in the BLM riots under Obama.
In Australia, the narrative was quickly manufactured after the Bondi beach attacks that the real hero was a Muslim. In Italy, after a recent Car Jihad attack, a similar narrative rapidly popped up.
I don’t want to get too conspiratorial here, but it’s apparently not very far fetched to speculate that there are government units, originally set up to fight racial tensions, e.g. the DOJ’s CRS, or Islamic terrorism, e.g. the UK’s RICU, that morphed into putting out narratives to spin Islamic terrorism and suppress the truth.