I can hear my mum saying it – ‘what has Lindt chocolate got to do with the price of fish?’ Whenever she used that particular saying it would always make me stop and consider what, in fact, the price of fish had to do with anything and how it found itself in the middle of so many of our family squabbles. We really weren’t and have never been such big fish eaters anyway.

When Man Haron Monis woke up on Monday December 15 I wonder what he was thinking. Having slipped from the collective memory of Australians almost completely, their memories were unfortunately jogged when it was already too late. Monis did not wake up on December 15 and transform from a peace-loving person into a hateful man ready to kill. Even if he was, as some have called him, a lone wolf his actions sprang from somewhere – his hate didn’t simply appear. People don’t merely become life-loathing. As the Iranian refugee chained to the New South Wales Parliament in 2001, insisting the Federal government bring his wife and children to Australia, we are justified in allowing this man to have slipped from our view. When he later became an unsavoury Muslim cleric who many wanted stopped due to the damage he was causing with his spouting, we can once again be forgiven for not having imprinted his name or actions into our memory. When he became accessory to the murder by setting alight of his ex-wife this incident did not get the coverage required to make a dent in our day. So it passed us by.

There are so many deplorable killings that happen everyday in every corner of the world it has become almost automatic for us to think they are the result of some grand master plan of global terrorism. In fact, when we do think in this way we unwittingly brush aside any other factors that might be involved so that we can make way for the flurry of fear, further hatred and anger that are so ensconced with the phrase that making room for any other emotions or considerations would be futile. We are so locked into this mindset that we cannot even see what we have become – collectively.

As each day starts we race to see what horrors may have occurred overnight. We pour through news feeds in case we may have missed something in our rush. We sigh and moan collectively. We mourn – collectively. We complain, groan and become infuriated at the world together. Our pain and anger is felt from every corner. We scratch our heads and wonder how it could be possible that they – the perpetrators – could be blind to their actions, could be humans like us. Over the course of a few hours, sometimes even a day, we let our feelings stew together in one big pot so that they become so twisted and complicated, layered and spread with all our anguish that it is absolutely astonishing how at the end of it all we can equate it to one simple phrase; call it one thing and be done with it. Global terrorism has become our laughing stock. Not only as a nation, as a world. What happened today? More global terrorism. And yesterday? Another incident of global terrorism. Why? Because we are all in this together, we must all unite against it, we must encourage division and embrace war. We must start a campaign and band together and put all our energy towards it.

Yet what it is really called is violence against women. Whichever way you read the news, however you turn it or twist it violence against women is at the core of almost every act of so-called global terrorism today. If it is not directly there it is lurking so close by you can smell it. It has become so engrained in the background it might as well be invisible. The male who beheads another male has a bevy of females who have been made to be his slaves. The men who have been shot and killed have lost their lives so that their women may be captured. The man who senselessly killed two innocent Australians had also sexually assaulted countless women and inhumanely murdered another. The list goes on and on ad nauseam. This is not coincidental. That Man and others have been labelled terrorists is accidental, convenient, neat and morbidly comforting. That Australians have since been accused of being Islamophobic and racially vilified is predictable and tedious.  In reality it only distracts us from the heart of what is really the matter with our country and our world. Just like the price of fish.