The Price of Having to Say You’re Not Them

The thing that stays with me about #NotInMyName isn’t the message—it’s the asymmetry that made the message necessary. ISIS had a full-scale propaganda infrastructure: multilingual, algorithmically distributed, reaching teenagers in Birmingham and Brussels and well beyond. What British Muslims had to oppose it was a camera and the willingness to stand in front of it and state, in plain language, that they didn’t endorse a terrorist organization. That this needed to be said at all is the part I can’t get past.

The campaign started circulating in the UK in late 2014, ordinary people speaking directly to camera, one by one, to distance themselves from a group that had claimed their religion as its flag. In my religion, tolerance toward women is taught, one young woman said, looking straight into the lens. And you have no respect for women at all. No theatrics, no raised voice. Just the flat correction of a lie, repeated across dozens of faces.

ISIS was skilled at one specific thing: making itself look like the inevitable endpoint of a worldview rather than a violent aberration from it. It didn’t just recruit—it reframed. It took a religion with a billion practitioners and tried to install itself as that religion’s loudest voice. The campaign was the refusal to let that reframing stand unchallenged, the insistence that a terrorist organization doesn’t get to define what it claims to represent.

Whether videos like this change minds among people already committed to radicalization is a harder question. Radicalization isn’t primarily a media problem—it’s a belonging problem, a grievance problem, something that can’t be fixed by clips alone. But #NotInMyName wasn’t aimed only at potential recruits. It was aimed at everyone else watching: the people deciding whether Islam and ISIS were synonyms or opposites. On that front, it mattered.

What I keep thinking about is the cost. The constant production of evidence of one’s own decency—because a few thousand murderers share a broad demographic label—is exhausting and unfair in a way that deserves to be named. The campaign was necessary and real and I’m glad it existed. It also shouldn’t have had to.