Several journalists and community activists informed IC Journal that they received a notification from Twitter in recent days that an investigation by the social media platform in response to their complaints has found that Kaveh Shahrooz has violated the Twitter Rules against “abuse and harassment”.
Kaveh Shahrooz is a fellow at a Canadian right wing think tank called the Macdonald Laurier Institute (MLI). Mr. Shahrooz is affiliated with the foreign policy program at MLI which is led by a former foreign policy official of Stephen Harper’s government.
Twitter rules against abusive behaviour state that users “may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so.” Twitter considers “abusive behavior an attempt to harass, intimidate, or silence someone else’s voice.”
One user who received the violation notice from Twitter told IC Journal that she has been the target of what she described as “online harassment and abuse” by Mr. Shahrooz multiple times. She believes that because of her opinion and “anti-war activism on Iran”, Mr. Shahrooz has falsely “smeared” her work and the work of organizations she has been affiliated with.
Another person with similar experience who also received the Twitter notice told IC Journal that Kaveh Shahrooz regularly uses “baseless and hateful dual loyalty charges” against members of his own Iranian-Canadian community when he doesn’t agree with someone’s political point of view. This person added: “he calls respected Canadian and American journalists and researchers of Iranian heritage lobbyists for the regime in Iran simply because these people don’t share Kaveh’s hawkish views and do not support war and maximum pressure against Iran.”
The individuals who talked to IC Journal feared that they would face further abuse online and agreed to talk to us only under the condition of anonymity. However, they provided a long list of social media posts from Shahrooz to support their claims.
In these tweets, Mr. Shahrooz calls well-known American-Iranian and Canadian-Iranian human rights activists, researchers working at American and Canadian think tanks and journalists working at outlets such as New York Times and Washington Post members of what he refers to as “Iran Lobby”. It’s noteworthy to mention that several of these respected journalists and activists have been victims of suppression and censorship by the Iranian government and do not travel to Iran due to fear of imprisonment in the country.
Targeting “Women of Color”
This is not the first time that Mr. Shahrooz’s online behavior has sparked outrage. Back in October 2020, Kaveh Shahrooz was forced to step down from the board of an American organization called Iran Human Rights Documentation Center after journalists and researchers criticized the tax-payer funded organization for the online behaviour of its board member.
The decision to oust Kaveh Shahrooz from the board of IHRDC came after American-Iranian journalist Negar Mortazavi published a collection of online attacks initiated by Shahrooz against herself and others and called out leadership of IHRDC for their silence.
Mortazavi said there is a pattern of regular online attacks using misogynistic language against Iranian-American women and other “women of color” by Mr. Shahrooz. Mortazavi’s tweets encouraged several others who were targeted by Kaveh Shahrooz’s online attacks to speak out against him. Shortly after these public reactions, IHRDC announced that he is no longer a member of their board of directors.
Negar Mortazavi has been a regular target of online smear campaigns by Shahrooz and individuals in his close circle at MLI and other political organizations he works with. It is believed that the reason behind the attacks on Mortazavi is her investigative reporting during the Trump administration on how Pompeo’s State Department provided funding to organizations that engaged in online attacks against American journalists and academics who opposed the administration’s Middle East policy.
As a result of Mortazavi’s reporting, the US Congress pressured the State Department to cut funding to at least one organization, E-Collaborative for Civic Education (ECCE). At the time the president of the ECCE was its co-founder Mariam Memarsadeghi. Memarsadeghi currently works with Shahrooz as a senior fellow at the Macdonald Laurier Institute (MLI).
Targeting Respected Academics and Researchers
A number of Shahrooz’s tweets shared with IC Journal are targeted at think-tankers and academics in the United States and Canada. Similar to other cases explained earlier, here as well Kaveh Shahrooz regularly calls the targeted academics lobbyists for the Islamic Republic of Iran without providing any evidence proving such ties.
In a recent tweet, Shahrooz posted a screenshot of an analysis written by Professor Vali Nasr, in 2015 about Russia’s role in Syria labeling him as “Iran Lobby” and adding: “Members of the #IranLobby present themselves to the West as geopolitical experts. They should be ridiculed and treated as the dictator-coddling clowns they are. And never listened to about Iran again.”
Vali Nasr is an accomplished professor at Johns Hopkins University and the author of multiple books on Iran, Middle East and US foreign policy in the region. He served as the Dean of the prestigious Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies between 2012 and 2019 and was a Senior Advisor to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke between 2009 and 2011.
Shahrooz has posted many similar tweets targeting a long list of researchers and academics at other American and Canadian institutions accusing them of dual loyalty and of being members of what he calls “the Iran Lobby gang”. Researchers targeted are affiliated with some of the most reputable organizations in U.S. and Canada including the International Crisis Group, Atlantic Council and Human Rights Watch.
Targeting Victims of the Islamic Republic
Shahrooz has even targeted well-known victims of the Islamic Republic of Iran. In a tweet attacking an article written by Washington Post journalist Jason Rezaian, he uses the label “Iran Lobby” and adds that “He [Rezaian] wasn’t much of a critic of the Iranian regime to begin with. And he seemed to develop even more intense Stockholm Syndrome when he got out.”
Jason Rezaian was appointed as Washington Post’s bureau chief in Tehran in 2012. He was arrested in 2014 and spent 544 days in Tehran’s Evin prison, including in solitary confinement. Rezaian frequently writes about human rights violations in Iran but at the same time he criticized Trump’s Iran policy and the decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal.
The notification from Twitter does not provide an explanation about what action the platform has taken against Shahrooz or which specific posts they identified as abusive. His account is still active on Twitter as of the time of this report.