nearly fifty years, and has done so despite what must have been enormous personal costs as his comrades all jumped ship, and in many cases, joined the cause of Israel's enemies." Media critic Eric Alterman wrote in the American Prospect regarding Peretz's tenure as editor of the New Republic, Peretz used the magazine to attack, tarnish, and marginalize people and institutions with which he personally or politically disagreed: "[D]uring his reign, Peretz has also done lasting damage to the cause of American liberalism. By turning TNR into a kind of ideological police dog, Peretz enjoyed... [playing] a key role in defining the borders of 'responsible' liberal discourse, thereby tarring anyone who disagreed as irresponsible or untrustworthy. But he did so on the basis of a politics simultaneously so narrow and idiosyncratic—in thrall almost entirely to an Israel-centric neoconservatism." During his entire tenure as owner of The New Republic Peretz repeatedly has used the magazine's editorial pages of to attack and marginalize individuals whom he perceives as enemies of Israel, among them even many mainstream Israeli politicians and activists whom he disagreed with.—"sometimes we attack people unfairly" according to his close friend and TNR literary editor Leon Wieseltier. For example, Peretz attacked the late I. F. Stone, after the journalist signed a public appeal for the provision of water and medical supplies for siege victims trapped in West Beirut during the 1982 Israeli Siege of Beirut: Peretz editorialized, "So this is what I. F. Stone has come to, asking his admirers to put up money so that the PLO can continue to fight." In an editorial titled "Blacklisted", Peretz claimed during the first Persian Gulf War in 1991 that he was "the only writer on the Middle East not invited by PBS or NPR to speak about the Gulf." In 1997, Peretz fired Michael Kelly as the editor of The New Republic after Kelly refused to publish a ghostwritten, unsigned editorial defending Peretz's former student and friend, Al Gore, who was then Vice President, and likely to run for the presidency when Bill Clinton's term was over. Kelly told The Washington Post that his "firing-by-phone came days after he refused to publish an unsigned item by Peretz saying that recent allegations of improper fund-raising by Gore were overblown and old news." Kelly further explained: "I didn't think that should be our editorial position. I wrote him a memo saying, Here's why