Militant Cleric's Anti-British Rant in School Assembly.
Imagine the scene where a cleric uses the platform at a school assembly to denounce the British presence in his country and calls for his co-religionists to make a stand with those the army is oppressing there.

At the time of this incident the army had been deployed a couple of years earlier to help preserve the peace in that country and were taking casualties in this thankless task. There was some feeling that the army should be pulled out and the inhabitants "left to get on with it!" The cleric made his appeal to a secondary school in Bradford which had a large number of third and fourth generation immigrant children from his home country. Their forebears had come to the city to work in the textile industry which depended upon cheap labour - and that was recruited from overseas. The important point is that the cleric clearly felt that these children owed some loyalty to the old country and its people.

On the whole the children were baffled rather than inflamed by the impassioned plea by this man and I don't think anything much came of it. The cleric was not invited back to the best of my knowledge. By this time the children had only the most tenuous links with the old country and any resentment towards "the British" had long since dissipated. The stories of their grandparents and great-grandparents having to walk from Bradford to Leeds to attend their nearest place of worship had passed into folk memory and any resistance to such buildings being developed locally (as alien impositions on the national culture) had long since ceased. Additionally the immigrants had by now their own well established school system. That did not mean, however, that the immigrant community felt entirely at ease among the host nation and there persisted some unspoken but genuinely felt fear that the conflict in this cleric's country could have serious repercussions on British streets. Occasionally their children would be asked to disperse quickly from school on the basis of rumours circulating in the city that they would be targetted by gangs of local youths. This was probably sheer paranoia - but even so it was a genuinely felt fear, met with a resolve not to retaliate in kind.

A casual observer in the secondary school would have found one aspect quite jarring however. Each class did not have a number to designate them; the classes were given the names of those who had been "martyred". Such markers emphasised to the children that, as well assimilated as they were in English culture, there were differences too. Yet the names of the martyrs were carefully selected to emphasise their English rather than foreign origins. In fact the names of the schools themselves were carefully chosen for the same reasons as if there was a concerted effort not to create an immigrant subculture but to stress that they too belonged and wished to belong. So the challenge to the host community is how welcoming they choose to be.

From an Evangelical perspective (and that is where I am coming from!) there is a much deeper challenge - do we see our role as defenders of our national culture against faiths perceived as 'foreign'? Are we inclined to feel threatened, defensive or even angry? In the face of militant calls from hostile clerics do we really believe that the Gospel is our greatest asset or do we think we need to take "action" of some other sort?

Oh! by the way the assembly I described was in 1970 and the cleric was an Irish Catholic priest.... I was there that day! This was St George's Secondary School on Cliffe Road and I was there for two years in "Anne Line" and "Henry Morse" before moving onto St Bede's in Emm Lane, Bradford.

post-script, 12th March 2010.
I came across this BBC article on local history which ties in nicely with the comments above, just click on the link... http://www.bbc.co.uk/bradford/content/articles/2006/05/12/bradford_irish_katie_feature.shtml