THE first time I see Ralph Cerminara he’s at a United Patriots Front (UPF) rally in Bendigo. He takes to the microphone. Lest you think he’s not proud to be Australian, he’s wearing a top emblazoned with “Aussie Pride”, the Australian flag, the coat of arms and two Ned Kellys.

Because I’m a trainspotter of the far-right, I know a little bit about him. He once led the Australian Defence League, an anti-Islam group that predates the UPF.

Not long ago the cops arrested him for brawling outside a mosque in Lakemba, Sydney. One police officer ended up in hospital with a fractured shoulder.

“Before I go on,” Ralph shouts, “I want to mention one thing. And that is the left-wing bigoted media.” The crowd hisses. “You’ve got people like leftie John Safran — and I’ve seen him around here — he calls people Nazis. You’re the f***in bigot, mate! You utterly disgust me.”

Dozens of “patriots” turn to me and boo. I breathe in and try to smile.

PAYING A VISIT TO RALPH

My eyes can’t make out the street numbers in the dark. I shine my phone on the bricks to check I have the right address. It was a twenty-minute train ride from Sydney’s CBD to this block of flats in Marrickville, in the inner west. I push the buzzer.

“G’day,” I say, “I wanted to speak to Ralph Cerminara.”

“Who is this?” a voice replies with suspicion.

“John Safran.”

“How’d you get my address?” he splutters, clearly bowled over by my detective work.

“I typed your name into White Pages.”

After several minutes of negotiation — he says I called the UPF Nazis, I counter I only called one of them an emo-Nazi — he buzzes me up.

Ralph is a man in his late thirties. His face is round and olive, with twitchy big brown eyes. We sit across from each other in his lounge room.

“So your surname is Italian?” I begin.

“Yeah.” He scratches his white singlet. “Father is Italian, mother is Aboriginal.”

“Huh!” I say, thoroughly delighted by this development.

He addresses a favourite chant sung by anarchists and socialists at the rallies: Always was, always will be Aboriginal land.

“When you get the left wing chanting at us, ‘Oh, this isn’t your land,’ and blah — hang on, my mother has won awards of parliament for community service with the Aboriginal community. She had all of this Aboriginal artwork that she’d done. Sold every single piece.”

Ralph says he was first drawn to anti-Islam after he asked for an Angus burger with bacon at a McDonald’s and was told there was no bacon. The store had turned halal, the girl behind the counter explained. He said, “You’ve got to be f***en kidding me.”

That was 2010. He believes Sydney has become more Islamised each year and you now can’t walk through certain suburbs.

“You do not go into Lakemba, simple and plain. I’d love to see you — as a Jewish person — walk down Haldon Street with a Jewish hat. You would be f***ing bashed.”

“Oh really?” I say. “What’s the name of the street again?”

“Haldon.”

I write “Haldon Street” on my hand.

It turns out Ralph was the guy who threw the Nazi off the UPF bus on the way to the Melbourne rally. He insists this proves that he, and the wider movement, are not Nazis. How can you be Nazis if you welcome Jews?

I ask about fellow UPF leader Blair Cottrells desire to hang a poster of Hitler in every classroom. “I don’t know anything about that,” he mumbles unconvincingly.

Ralph’s interactions with Muslims all seem to be biffo-related. He once held an Australian Defence League meeting at a pub in Lakemba. He says a group of Muslims found out and burst in screaming, “You Aussie dogs, you ADL f***ing scum.”

“I’m not going to cop this shit,” Ralph tells me, “so I turned around and said, ‘Well, Mohammed’s a paedophile.’ Which he is. Under Australian law, Mohammed is a paedophile.”

“You would have known you were winding them up.”

“They said Aussie dogs,” Ralph retorts. “Which, to me, is a racial slur. You’re identifying my nationality. So it’s the same as me going, ‘you Arab c***s’”.

I’m trying to follow his train of thought. I ask him why he told them Mohammed was a paedophile, why he hadn’t just called them Arab c***s.

“That’s racist,” Ralph explains.

He grabs two beers from the fridge, then he pulls up a video on his computer. His buddy is filming as Ralph strides up a street in Lakemba, with “Islam is Evil” printed in big black letters on his white T-shirt. He plants a ban Islam, sharia law not welcome poster on a street pole.

“What are you f***ing doing?” complains an elderly Muslim man approaching Ralph and spotting the poster. “Who put this right here? F***ing piss off before I f***ing kill you.”

“You got this, man?” Ralph asks his friend behind the camera. “A straight-up threat.”

“A straight-up threat,” the cameraman smugly agrees.

Ralph presses “pause” on the video and turns to me. “He’s being aggressive,” he says indignantly.

I’m confounded that Ralph thinks the footage paints the old Muslim guy, not him, as aggressive. What does “ban Islam” even mean?

IF RALPH WERE PRIME MINISTER

“If you were prime minister –”

“Every mosque demolished. Bulldozed. And put houses there for some homeless people.”

He’s suspicious of Islamic schools too. “They’re building barbed-wire fences,” he says of a particular school, “and it’s monitored 24/7 by security guards. Why do they have it?”

“Maybe they think you’re going to go there and attack them.”

Ralph doesn’t see it this way. He believes that just as dangerous bikies conspire in clubhouses behind barbed wire, so too do the Muslims.

The burqa would be banned if he were prime minister, but the hijab is okay because it’s really just like a hoodie. His liberal attitude to the hijab seems to be born of personal experience; he’s ticked off about times he’s been told he can’t wear his hoodie.

'Stop the Mosques' banner culprit talks 'Stop the Mosques' banner culprit talks

The Qur’an, too, would be banned. Ralph takes me through his reasoning. There was a call for a ban of the blink-182 song I Miss You after a girl quoted its lyrics in a suicide note, and “there’s nothing as bad as ‘kill non-Muslims, kill Jews and Christians’ in the blink-182 song”.

I must have picked up a lucky penny today. I’m still perky from finding out that a leading “white” nationalist is Aboriginal, when who should crawl into the room? Asian baby!

Ralph’s wife is Vietnamese and, like Ralph’s dad, an immigrant.

I say that many people, looking at the UPF, see it as the type of group that would have been monstering Vietnamese immigrants a generation ago, and Italian immigrants two generations ago. But Ralph sees no hypocrisy. Just as he elucidated the difference between “Arab c***s” (unacceptable) and “Mohammed is a paedophile” (acceptable), he makes a distinction between ethnicity and religion.

And, as is the case with Blair, he might not like the Muslims, but he really hates the left. If it wasn’t for the left pushing for multiculturalism and immigration, there wouldn’t be a Muslim problem in Australia to begin with.

Ralph enjoys beavering away on his Left Wing Bigots Exposed website. He digs up dirt on those who criticise the anti-Islam movement. He found photos of one next to a dead elephant in Africa.

“So you are going over there, you support killing elephants? And you call us bigots?”

I’m a little tipsy from the beer, so I can’t figure out if shooting an elephant makes you a bigot. Or whether opposing Islamophobia but shooting an elephant makes you a hypocrite.

Because of his antipathy towards “lefties”, I laugh when he tells me, ‘I take every test online, “Are you left-wing or right-wing?” It always tells me I’m left-wing! F***, man, I’m not a f***ing left-wing bigot!”

Ralph asks if I smoke. I don’t but I tell him I do. Don’t really know why. To keep the conversation going? Out on his balcony, drizzle from the night sky hits our faces.

Maybe, he says, the online tests label him left-wing because he supports indigenous causes. He always clicks “yes” on those questions.

He’s upset that the government is closing down remote Aboriginal communities. “That’s our land. That’s Aboriginal land, and you’re kicking these people off their own land because the government can’t afford it?” Then he adds, “Yet you’re going to bring in Muslims from another country and spend millions a year?”

I cough from the smoke and Ralph pulls a weird face that I can’t interpret. He reveals he had been writing a piece for Left Wing Bigots Exposed on me. He says he will kill the piece because it was nice I came over to chat.

He looks at my hand, where I’ve scribbled “Haldon Street”.

“Don’t do it,” he warns.

LAKEMBA, PLAIN AND SIMPLE

Okay, so now I’m pulling up in Lakemba wearing a yarmulke, the Jewish skullcap. I’m also wearing my tzitzit — they’re those strings that dangle out the bottom of your shirt. I’ve gone the full Fiddler on the Roof.

Walking from the car. I’m also carrying a copy of Australian Jewish News.

Lord, it’s hot.

Walking past these kids near the train line. I brace for them to say something, but they just continue bouncing their tennis ball.

I’m now up on the main street, Haldon Street, passing by the shops. People are everywhere — Africans and Arabs — in thawbs and hats as well. They’re not attacking me, Ralph.

People aren’t even looking. Everyone seems to be just minding their own business, Ralph. A bus speeds by.

“Hi, how are you?”

“Good. How are you?”

Ralph, I just had my first verbal exchange. A man on a box outside a grocery shop. You know that I would love, for the sake of this book, to be mildly beaten up but it’s just not happening. I walk on.

I’m fanning myself in the scorching heat with my Australian Jewish News.

Over to my left is the Lakemba Uniting Church. So if the Muslims can put up with them maybe they can put up with me. Oh! There’s a Greek Orthodox Church as well.

There’s no one noticing me. Not one person. Here comes a woman in a full niqab. I’m not being noticed.

I’m feeling the sweat soak through my socks and the sweat run down my back. I’ve stepped in bubblegum. That’s how much drama hasn’t happened: I’m making a note that I’ve stepped in bubblegum. Ralph, the readers thank you for this thrilling addition. This swashbuckling adventure.

“Just that, thank you.”

“Sixty cents, please.”

Bought a Chupa Chups, Ralph. From a Muslim. Ralph, you are an idiot. Care factor about the man in the Jewish hat wandering around Lakemba: Zero.

Car’s pulling up near me. Hopefully, if I’m lucky, some guys will jump out and beat me up.

No.

Okay, I’m now walking past a dumped mattress on the side of the street. That’s the most dynamic thing that’s happening, Ralph.

There’s a sheikh-looking guy! He’s rolling towards me in an electric wheelchair. Maybe the sheikh will run me down.

Nope.

My god! I’m back in the car. Turn on the airconditioner. Jesus!

My nose is sunburnt. Thanks, Ralph.

This is an edited extract from John Safran’s book Depends What You Mean By Extremist, published by Penguin Random House. He’s currently touring nationally to talk about it.