Suffering the reality of extremism has made Alpha Cheng more determined to stand up to racism. He reflects on his father’s murder, Fraser Anning’s speech and the close Muslim friend who helped him through his darkest hour

Three years after the worst day of his life, Alpha Cheng picks his words with care.

The 31-year old schoolteacher speaks out – sometimes. He talks about what he knows: racism, his friends and what happened to his father. In October 2015, Curtis Cheng was leaving work at Parramatta police station when he was shot and killed by a 15-year-old boy claiming to act for Islamic State.

In the years since, there have been trials, inquests and people telling Cheng – in what they think is a compliment – that they could not have done what he has done. In 2016, he wrote to Pauline Hanson and told her to stop using his father’s death to attack Muslim migration. This year, after senator Fraser Anning called for a return to the White Australia policy, he did the same.

“If anyone should be spiteful at Muslims, many would say that it would be me,” he wrote.

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“[But] I am tired of needing to explain to adults that the actions of these individuals cannot be attributed to an entire group of people.”

One of his closest friends, Qais Mohammed, is a Muslim. They became friends the same way anyone does in late-stage university life – a friend of a friend needed a housemate.

They discovered they had done the same course at uni, and were big history buffs, both nerds who liked to talk about ancient geopolitics.

Their friendship is something that Cheng brings up in his replies to people like Hanson and Anning – though of course, as both Cheng and Mohammed have said, they shouldn’t have to. The two spoke to Guardian Australia about their friendship and the rise in public racism they witnessed in 2018.

In 2015, when Curtis was murdered, Mohammed took the week off work and helped the Cheng family around the house. Together with Alpha and his closest friends, they sat and wrote the eulogy.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alpha Cheng stands in front of his father’s casket during his funeral service in October 2015. Photograph: Sam Ruttyn/AAP

He does not see it as a grand gesture. “You do as friends do,” Mohammed says. “The time that Alpha went through, the worst days of his life, you offer any support that you can. That is just what you do.”

They had previously discussed, in an abstract way, Muslim extremism, but it was not a debate that changed after the Parramatta shooting.

“I remember having geopolitical, historical discussions around the roots of the Islam and west conflict, stemming from the crusades,” Cheng says. “Elements of history like the golden ages of Islam and how that changed in terms of its relationship with the west and other minorities. I know Qais has an interest in that. I really enjoyed discussing it.

“Nobody should ever go through what I have needed to go through, but there is a lot more to understand about extremism. That it is definitely not just because of religion. And I think that sometimes in the rhetoric of things, people don’t want to hear about complexity. They don’t want to hear that there are lots of layers to it.”

For both men, it was hard to see Anning trash that kind of nuance in parliament in August. The former One Nation senator used his maiden speech to call for a halt on Muslim immigration, an explicit return to the “predominantly European immigration policy of the pre-Whitlam consensus” (the White Australia Policy), and used the phrase “final solution to the immigration issue”, with its loaded Nazi connotations.

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“Every time I read that, it hits me personally,” Mohammed says. “It is that sense of ‘I’m no longer welcome.’ When you see a speech like that, you walk down the street and people know that you’re Muslim, you sort of think, well, do they look at me differently now? Australia is everything I have known and been raised in … Well what else do you have?”

For Cheng, Anning’s speech was the spur to act. To the outside observer, the contrast was stark. Anning, the wannabe demagogue, had cited Isis and terrorism in his call for division. Cheng, who had suffered the reality of extremism, called for tolerance – a man who seemed to now spend his life constantly turning the other cheek.

People always go, why are you not angry? Why are you not spouting hate? Alpha Cheng

But it is not true that Cheng does not hate.

“People always go, why are you not angry? Why are you not, you know, spouting hate? The thing is, for me, that is very private. And what people don’t seem to know or realise is that it is incredibly challenging. It does hurt from time to time.”

When Farhad Jabar murdered Cheng’s father, the CCTV caught him strutting on the street outside Parramatta police headquarters. An 18-year-old had given him the gun. He told a court that he did not feel sorry.

“We are in the middle of four court cases with people that are accused and being sentenced for their crimes and involvement,” Cheng says. “And I find it incredibly difficult to be in the same courtroom. I can’t look them in the face or in the eye.

“People say ‘Oh, I can’t believe you’ve forgiven them for what has happened.’ And I say, ‘No … it’s a lot more than that.’ To say I don’t have any negative emotions is quite false.”

In November, another plotter, Milad Atai, took back an apology he had made to the family. He declared remorse to be “bullshit”, shortly before he was sentenced to 38 years in jail.

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“It’s a challenge to speak and write in a way that has a responsibility,” Cheng says. “To separate out some of the personal grief and trauma. It would have been easy, but I guess I didn’t take the easy way out.”

The two men don’t spell it out but they have realised they took more care with their words when they wrote Curtis’s eulogy than elected officials do on the floor of parliament.

“In the very early stage, within a week or two of when Dad died, Qais and other friends of mine were just sitting in a room, writing,” says Cheng. “Knowing that words that I have to say, matter.

“A lot of people say ‘I can’t do what you do.’ That’s where I get that sense that it would be so easy, because it seems like everyone says that’s what they would do.”

Mohammed now lives with his wife in London, and works in finance. Cheng, a teacher, lives in Canberra. He travels back to Sydney sometimes to have meetings and speak at community events. He also occasionally writes opinion pieces, after thinking about what to say because, if people are going to be listening, it matters to him that he gets it right.