Update on Friday had a story from the website of the Anti-Defamation League on "hate bikers," including two such groups in Alabama. (See below link.)

"Growing connections, overlapping cultures and increasing crossover between outlaw motorcycle gangs and white supremacist groups have created a disturbing new trend -- the formation of explicitly white supremacist biker gangs," ADL reported.

In a new report, Bigots on Bikes: The Growing Links between White Supremacists and Biker Gangs, ADL found that increased social and criminal connections between the two movements have led to the formation of these gangs. "Though they are still small, the appearance of these groups is cause for concern," said an ADL official, who was quoted in the Update story.

In response to the story, we received an email from Jody Wolfe, one of our regular readers. Jody, a biker himself, is a donor to The Birmingham Jewish Federation Annual Campaign and passionate supporter of Israel. Jody, an ex-Mountain Brook police officer and former owner of a service station in Crestline, was concerned that the story created an unfair impression of bikers. Below is an edited version of an email Jody sent us:

I am a biker, and many of my friends are too. I could round up between 300-500 in 36 hours just for a ride for a cause for a baby, a child, a needy family. Bikers are great people -- it's the 1%ers who are bad dudes.

Bikers are doctors and lawyers and military vets and people like me. I am not nor would I ever be a friend of the KKK. My cousin, a military vet is a "Tribe Of Judah" biker. He loves the Lord and wins the trust of Biker Clubs. When they allow him to come to one of their meetings, he will go with the soul purpose to tell them about Jesus, and I go with him.

I wanted to tell you the bikers I personally know are Christian, love the Lord and would come to the rescue of anyone who needs them or needs a charity ride for a needy child, family or military vet. Not all bikers are bad guys! And, as my cousin says, "You cannot be a Christian and hate the Jews."

Picture is of Jody Wolfe and friend at Daytona Bikeweek, March, 2009.

By Richard Friedman, Executive Director

Jewish Telegraphic Agency reported Friday that Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas has acknowledged that the Palestinian failure to seize the opportunity for statehood in 1947 was a mistake.

"It was our mistake. It was an Arab mistake as a whole," the Palestinian Authority president told Israel's Channel 2 TV in an interview translated by the Associated Press. "But do they punish us for this mistake for 64 years?"

The Zionist leadership accepted the 1947 UN-designated partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states, but the Palestinians and their Arab backers rejected it, launching a war, JTA noted. "Abbas' view is a sharp departure from what has become Palestinian dogma that Israel's independence was a catastrophe inflicted on the Palestinians by the Zionist movement," the report added.

This report resonated with me. In 1985, I was part of an interfaith trip of 120 Birmingham community leaders who visited Israel in connection with the honoring of Israel by what was then Birmingham's Festival of Arts.

The group visited Bethlehem where the city's mayor, Elias Freij, spoke to us and castigated Israel as an occupier and aggressor. I was part of a small group that had the chance to chat with Freij afterwards. I pointed out to him that if the Palestinian Arabs and other Arabs had not rejected the partition plan and invaded Israel, the Palestinians would have had a state. He, like Abbas did last week, acknowledged the rejection of this UN compromise was a mistake.

There are two sadnesses in all of this. The Palestinians have built a mythology that has been used to demonize and attack Israel ever since and their own people have suffered tragically.

The takeaway is this: While we can't go backward, going forward we, as Jews and other friends of Israel, must continue to tell the truth about events surrounding Israel's rebirth, and recognize that the longstanding and continuing policy of Palestinian rejection of the Jewish state is the cause of their plight.