There is something surreal about watching your city being profiled on television for all the wrong reasons:

There is something surreal about watching your city being profiled on television for all the wrong reasons: where were the cameras last weekend when 130,000 people of all cultures enjoyed a trouble-free Mela – an Asian part of Bradford's popular annual festival? There is something surreal about watching your city being profiled on television for all the wrong reasons: where were the cameras last weekend when 130,000 people of all cultures enjoyed a trouble-free Mela – an Asian part of Bradford's popular annual festival?Instead, Bradford is presented as a site of intractable and deteriorating race relations. What was intended to be a peaceful protest by the Anti-Nazi League against the BNP and National Front spiralled out of control.It could have turned out so differently. Youth workers had almost eased the anger of the crowd successfully, when inflammatory comments from one speaker stirred them up again. Then the rumour factory started spreading tales of this Asian youth being stabbed or that youth being taunted by right-wing thugs. The rest is history or media footage.How are we to understand events in Bradford? Should we bracket them with Oldham and Burnley? Each of these cities has a distinctive history and mix of communities, as well as specific reasons for outbursts of trouble. We should beware of conflating them.However, with regard to Oldham and Bradford, both have suffered huge de-industrialisation with the dramatic decline of staple textile industries. Both have growing young British Pakistani communities, living within relatively self-segregated worlds, often in very straitened circumstances.

Large numbers of these young men are massively underachieving in education. This creates anger and alienation from their own leadership and wider society.If we are to identify what is going wrong, it is right to disaggregate the category "Asian" – British Indian communities are achieving more than the ethnic majority on most key indicators. Many of these communities are "Muslim" but the issue is not "Islamic". Indeed, the youngsters who attend the mosques are not those throwing petrol bombs at the police.

We must await the publication this week of Herman Ouseley's inquiry into how to improve inter-community relations in the city. He can build on the mela factor, a reservoir of goodwill and imagination in all communities to live together and enjoy diversity.However, it will also need the political will to engage with youth in all communities and to make sure that monies coming into the city for regeneration are well spent and the education system begins to deliver for all. The city's two worst schools serve white estates: unless we can address disadvantage in both communities we will end up with each scapegoating the other.Dr Philip Lewis is the inter-faith adviser to the Anglican Bishop of Bradford.. The rioting was a copybook National Front sting and it left the more reflective among Bradford's teenage Asians wondering how on earth they had fallen for it.

The rioting was a copybook National Front sting and it left the more reflective among Bradford's teenage Asians wondering how on earth they had fallen for it.Just as in Oldham ­ one of the four former mill towns to have burnt on sultry Saturday nights these six weeks past ­ the National Front (NF) stoked the fire days ago by announcing plans for a march. They knew full well it would be banned by the Home Secretary but would serve the purpose of bringing out the white liberal Anti Fascist League in force, with Asians and national television crews in tow.In identical circumstances in Oldham on 26 May, tensions were sufficiently high to turn a street-corner row between adolescent boys into a riot. In Burnley on 22 June, it was a row over a noisy party; in Bradford itself on 14 April, a clash at a Hindu wedding. On Saturday, all it took was the rumour that half a dozen tattooed whites had emerged from Yates' Wine Lodge mouthing racist obscenities for the worst inner-city riots since the 1980s to be set off.The violence was ratcheted up when two whites ­ one with "England" tattooed on his back ­ were subsequently stabbed by Asians. Five people were arrested and many of the 300 congregating Asians were pushed away from central Centenary Square, up the hill into Manningham, by police.By 8pm, the fires were well alight there and could be seen blazing on the skyline from the city centre as young Asians began hurling missiles at West Yorkshire officers. They complained bitterly of police leniency with the shadowy white presence even though the afternoon had seen more arrests of white people than of Asians.

But as far as the cameras were concerned, this had nothing to do with white supremacists ­ come the evening, they had all disappeared. Instead, it was the brutality of the young teenagers on Manningham's White Abbey road, between 9pm and 2am, which marked out these riots from all others in northern England this summer.In place of the Oldham petrol bombs were the Bradford fireworks ­ "air bombs" as they had christened them ­ a terrifying and disorientating missile for the phalanx of 180 riot shielded officers, in rows of 30, to face. The deafening noise which preceded each landing sounded like gunfire in the melee but gave no clue of where the next missile might land.The air bombs were thrown when the bricks, fire extinguishers, beer kegs and paving stones had also temporarily run out. At intermittent intervals, police charged and the 40 principal agitators fled, preceded by 100 young Asians who had stood behind them, but before midnight all such advances were short-lived: police were eventually forced back on their heels so far that their attackers stumbled on missiles they had already thrown and relaunched them.There were at least two "air bomb" casualties among 120 police officers injured in the night's clashes. One officer, who lurched forward in agony as a steel bar landed on his foot, was the only one to be detained in hospital Two police horses were also injured, one of them stabbed. Members of the Manningham Ward Labour Club, a blackened wreck yesterday, were trapped inside when the rioters set the building on fire and placed burning cars against the fire doors Firefighters cleared a route for them to escape.