helen,
In about 2008 (if memory serves) I flew with a captain who was hauled onto the carpet with the CP-B. His crime? He had been given a flight plan over the Himalayas in a -300, which was performance limited for the sector, and declined, asking for southerly alternate routing. This resulted in a large delay for the flight, Chinese ATC being what it is, and upon arriving back in DXB was summoned to the office to explain. The DEC captain, big Irish gent, stuck to his guns and laid out his logical reasons for delaying the flight. This increasingly infuriated the local CP, especially the point at which he asked the captain if in the future, faced with a similar situation, would he repeat the same decision? To which the captain calmly replied that of course he would, after all his job was to make difficult decisions in the best interests of safety, he had done so on the flight in question, why wouldn't he in the future?
At that point the CP bluntly told him that if he did repeat such a decision, the captain's wife and new daughter would never find him in the desert, and Emirates would have "forgotten" about him.
If you don't believe this, ask the other person at that meeting, the now DCP-B, of the one half of the Canadian wine family. He did not defend the captain in the slightest.
As the captain told me, his biggest regret was that he hadn't recorded the meeting. I don't know if he's still at EK.
So sure. It may have been only "rhetoric". But to suggest that such dire things are never threatened, is false. To think that they don't happen in the UAE, is naive. it wasn't that long ago Sheikh Issa was torturing an Afghani over a few thousand dirham.