In a New York Times op-ed piece, Henry Louis Gates, chairman of Harvard's Afro-American studies department, condemned black anti-Semitism but put the ultimate blame on conservatives. "After 12 years of conservative indifference, those political figures who acquiesced, by benign neglect, to the deepening crisis of black America should not feign surprise that we should prove so vulnerable to the demagogues' rousing messages of hate, their manipulation of the past and present."

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