The grisly killing of 10 journalists and two police officers at the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo on Jan. 7 was met with global indignation. A day later, Agence France-Presse reported the Libyan branch of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) beheaded two Tunisian journalists. Investigative journalist Sofiene Chourabi and photographer Nadir Khtari were kidnapped in September, with the group accusing them in a statement of working for a “satellite channel that fights religion.” Their beheadings received scant media coverage but, if confirmed, they made January the bloodiest month for journalists since 2012.

In France, as in elsewhere in the Western world, the attack on Charlie Hebdo is being lamented, and the dead journalists are being celebrated as heroes whose work exemplifies a fearless and defiant pursuit of freedom of expression. However, this fight for freedom of speech is not always seen as a Muslim struggle. Yet the number of Muslim journalists killed defending journalism tells a different story. More than half of 61 journalists killed in 2014 were Muslims, many working in conflict-affected countries such as Iraq, Syria, Pakistan and Somalia. But few have received the recognition or commemoration accorded to Western journalists or a handful who worked for Western media outlets.

The freedom to speak, know and tell the truth is a universal value, and the sacrifices of its Muslim stalwarts must be remembered just as much as those who perished in the cowardly attack in Paris.

Some readers might see the emphasis on the identity of the dead journalists as morally suspect in the aftermath of terrorism’s latest carnage. To be clear, this is not a competition of faiths. But the evident double standard and selective outrage illuminates the hierarchy of privilege in our moral reckoning in response to acts of terrorism. It is a dynamic that becomes visible only when Western journalists are targeted.

For example, last year the gruesome beheading of James Foley and Steven Sotloff by ISIL fighters, captured on video, dominated global headlines. But the deaths of Muslim journalists at the hands of the same savages were ignored. Barely a month after Sotloff’s murder, in October ISIL shot and killed journalist Mohammad al-Aqidi of Iraq’s Sada news agency and beheaded Raad Mohammed Azaouie, an Iraqi cameraman and photographer for Sama Salah Aldeen TV. A month later, four more Iraqi journalists were killed in Mosul. But the news made fleeting headlines, never mind a collective outcry from proponents of free speech.

Their invisibility is part of the routine eliding over terrorism’s brown, Muslim victims that allows the extremists’ unexamined xenophobia and divisive narrative of us versus them to prevail and persist. Failure to mourn and recognize the sacrifices of terrorism victims equally carries enormous risk. The aversion to terrorism only when it reaches the West or kills Westerners suggests our ease with the banishment of terrorism to some distant terrains.