Never count on your neighbors, it seems. Two stories from a while ago:
Peter Mayer was Salman Rushdie’s courageous publisher at Penguin Books, and he received many death threats, including one scrawled in blood. An anonymous telephone call told Mayer that “not only would they kill me but they would take my daughter and smash her head against a concrete wall.” …
Far from rallying to defend an innocent girl and her innocent father, the parents of her classmates demanded that the school expel her. What would happen, they asked, if the Iranian assassins went to the school and got the wrong girl? And Mayer thought, “You think my daughter is the right girl?” The same cowardice greeted him when he applied for a co-op apartment in New York. “There were objections that the Iranians could send a hit squad and target the wrong apartment.” …
Ayaan Hirsi Ali … was hideously threatened in a letter skewered to the murdered body of Theo van Gogh by the butcher’s knife with which his throat had been cut. The two of them had collaborated on making a remarkably gentle and understated ten-minute film about three quietly suffering Muslim women. That was the “offence”, the “hurt” to Islamic sensitivities for which van Gogh was slaughtered and Ayaan threatened. … Ayaan was shabbily treated even by her neighbours, who feared that they might be collateral damage if her apartment was attacked. Worse, a Dutch court ruled that the placing of Ayaan in a new place of safety was “a breach of her new neighbours’ human rights.” (source, source)
More in the annals of heartlessness.
This is how our governments protect us….