A few days ago I shared dinner with a beautiful young Muslim woman in Paris. Her lovely and serene smile does not reveal the grief she has known. In 2002, her 17-year-old sister, Sohane Benziane was drenched in gasoline and burned to death by a former boyfriend while his friends watched. His simple reason for planning and staging her brutal murder was that she would not obey him. When the police escorted him back to the crime scene for investigation purposes, he was cheered by young men from the outer Paris immigrant slum. Sohane continued to be abused in death when a plaque in her memory was repeatedly desecrated.

Like Sohane and her sister, Rifqa Bary who ran from her Ohio Muslim home after converting to Christianity, also commands our attention and compassion. Americans understandably are loathe to imagine the possibility of an honor killing; the civilized mind does not link "honor" and "murder." But under the warped dictates of Shar'iah practice, Rifqa's transgression of abandoning Islam is considered apostacy and treason. In Rifqa's case, the insult to her family is magnified by the fact that she has broken an Islamic family tradition of 150 generations.

The media are willing accomplices in the public denial of Shar'iah-sponsored killing. In these cases and others they strain for any explanation except the apparent connection to radical Islam. The news accounts of Sohane's death blamed social conditions for the general oppression of immigrant women in impoverished and non-integrated Paris communities. This inclination to grasp at any alternative theory for such brutality is not just a disservice to the public but disrespects the women who risk much to rebel against the cruel domination of Shar'iah rule.

In the case of Rifqa Bary, American reporters have been quite anxious to discredit her Christian conversion by portraying her as a brainwashed victim of an offbeat religious cult. Of course the social acceptability of Rifqa's conversion is not the issue. What should be the focus of discussion is how she says her father's reacted to the news: "If you have this Jesus in your heart, you're dead to me. You're not my daughter." Rifqa also explained: "They have to kill me. My blood is now halal, which means that because I'm now a Christian-I'm from a Muslim background-it's an honor."

Rifqa's case is now with Child Protective Services in Florida and another court hearing is scheduled for the end of this month. When our courts overreach to meddle in the family domain by forcing a 10-year-old Christian child out of home schooling and into public school in part for her "rigidity on questions of faith," this same parens patriae power should legitimately be used to assess the peril of a young girl who claims her father has declared his intention to restore the family honor by killing her. It is true that not all such assertions come with clues as to the veracity of the charge but in this case, Rifqa's father has a close connection to Ohio's Noor Islamic Cultural Center, which is reported to have close ties to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. When Harvard chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser wrote to a student about Islamic law on executions for apostacy that "there is great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand," it is imperative for western cultures to heed such revelations.

When Texas sisters Sarah and Amina Said were murdered by their father for their choice of boyfriends, we were put on notice that the practice of honor killing had come to America. On 9-11 when jihadists murdered 3017 everyday Americans, we were put on notice that Shariah motivated mass murder had come to America. Both despicable practices stem from the same perverted legal-religious regime. We are now on notice -- and we indulge denial and naivete in the face of this reality at our peril.