Nick Ahad: My home city should not be terrorised by these extremists

The last time a bunch of racist thugs gathered en masse in Bradford was in 2001 and the tensions caused by the National Front demonstration caused riots that left damage of about 11m to my city. Not again.

This weekend, the people of Bradford need to hold their nerve and not allow themselves to be provoked by a tiny minority of extremists who, in no way, represent a mainstream view.

Many who look at Bradford from the outside see a segregated city that fills them with fear. This viewpoint is wrong.

I was born in Keighley to a Bangladeshi father and an English mother. Regular trips to Bradford to see relations on my father's side of the family fill my boyhood memories. For me, it is a place full of colour and laughter, the place where I first saw the hilarious sight of my mother wearing a sari, where the taste of spicy food still lingered on my tongue long after I'd left my relatives' homes.

My first taste of curry came in the basement of Bradford's oldest Asian restaurant, where I would regularly spend Sunday mornings waiting to collect a takeaway breakfast with my parents, watching venerable old Asian men eating their breakfasts of oily paratha, sweet halva and spicy chana – a picture I can still see vividly when I close my eyes.

This is my Bradford.

The English Defence League hope to find a place where they can plant their seeds of hate and watch them grow.

Bradfordians need to stand together and tell the EDL: "Not here, and not anywhere."

Today, I can call Bradford "my city", but it is not something I have easily claimed.

My parents instilled in their four children ambition and the message that a good education was the key to success. My father also instilled in his children the message that a profession that we could take anywhere in the world was vital. Why? Because, he warned us, there would always be someone ready to remind us, his mixed race children, that this was not "our country". To you, it might sound like a sketch from Goodness Gracious Me, but it is true that my father would regularly sit us down and tell us that we needed a profession with

which we could travel the world because one day this country might

decide that it didn't want us here any longer.

In the Eighties, the reason for my father's fears were all too obvious when I saw the letters '"NF" graffiti-ed on walls. I think National Front was one of the first acronyms I learned. Now the English Defence League intends to remind me once again that my father's pessimism for the future was all too well placed with a static demonstration after the Home Secretary, rightly, banned a proposed march through predominantly ethnic sections of the city. The EDL laughingly claims on its website that it is not a racist group. It has a single aim – to oppose extreme Islam – or so it claims.

Yet the EDL is simply the new name for those same racist, terror-inducing organisations that have daubed their hate-fuelled acronyms across my personal history. When I was a boy, it was the NF. Later it was the BNP, now it is the EDL, and in a couple of years' time a new acronym will make the words of my father resonate once again.

I'll be back in Keighley, playing cricket. While out in the middle, I will fear for my Bangladeshi relatives who live in Bradford – if only I could gather my extended family together shuttle them out of Bradford for the day. Young Asian men may be tempted to make a show of strength against these people. They learned a different lesson to the one I heard from my father.

This is their country, they were told, and they have every right to stand up and fight for their place in it.

I only hope that they don't rise to the bait. They need to turn their back on these violent thugs and not give them the chance to say what they desperately want to; namely Bradford can erupt with the right provocation. Not here any more.

It is time for all Bradfordians to claim the city and keep her safe from these extremists who want to bring fear to our homes.

Nick Ahad is the Yorkshire Post's Arts Reporter.