Note from the editor of the CAMERA on Campus Blog: This article was written and published by Aaron Bandler, a reporter for the Jewish Journal (Los Angeles). CAMERA on Campus is proud to share their incredible work with our readers.
The influencer uses his platform to fight anti-Israel views.
Israeli Canadian social media influencer Shai DeLuca was confronted with a rather interesting claim when he spoke at the University of Rochester through CAMERA on Campus in December: A masked anti-Israel protester who claimed to be from Nablus said that there are houses in the West Bank city with LGBT flags flying from their rooftops.
DeLuca, who is gay, told The Journal that he responded by saying that he had been to Nablus and asked the protester to provide evidence of the claim. The protester claimed to have pictures on his phone. “Fantastic! Show me,” DeLuca recalled saying. But the protester said that he couldn’t show him the pictures because his phone died. DeLuca offered to provide him one of his phone chargers and that he had “all the cords” available that could fit whatever phone the protester had.
The protester’s response: “I don’t want a dirty Zionist touching my phone.”
This incident was an outlier for DeLuca when he speaks on college campuses, and he knew the protester was lying the whole time. “It’s just become so okay to lie, and so okay to be brazen about your bull,” he said.
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DeLuca spoke to The Journal following the talk he gave at the CAMERA on Campus student conference at Boston University on July 31; he is the founder and president of Shai DeLuca Interior Design and has been in the television world for more than a decade. His work experience includes the recently canceled show “Cityline” and is currently a contributor for “The Morning Show.” His experience in television is what led to him to being “pushed into” becoming a social media influencer.
DeLuca began speaking out on matters related to Israel and antisemitism during Operation Protective Edge in 2014. “I have this platform of almost 100,000 people who follow me, I’m going to use this not only for what I talk about — which is fashion and design — but I’m going to use it as an opportunity to speak the truth,” he said. DeLuca said he has experienced antisemitism from some of his past work colleagues, but not at his current job with “The Morning Show.”
Following the Oct. 7 massacre, DeLuca has dedicated his social media entirely toward what’s happening in Israel and against antisemitism and anti-Zionism in the diaspora. “Before Oct. 7, I think that a lot less people were as brazen and as bold with their antisemitism as they are today,” he said, citing his experience at the University of Rochester as an example. While most of the response he gets on social media is positive, he does get various death threats in his direct messages inbox. “I really don’t pay attention to them,” he said.
DeLuca thinks that “‘Queers for Palestine’ makes no sense,” recalling a recent video that came out where people in the West Bank said on camera LGBT rights will never happen in Palestine. “The (Palestinian Authority’s) laws right now are that being gay is illegal. In Gaza, you are killed if you show signs belonging to the LGBT community. In Gaza you’re killed for it, in the West Bank you are at minimum imprisoned, if not killed,” he said. “From the LGBT community that knows what’s up, I’ve only gotten support. Israel has one of the, if not the biggest, Pride celebration on the Asian continent every year. And Israel is, with all of the problems that we still have, as I like to call it a gay Mecca. But there are always going to be those people who in their mind are ignorant and don’t want to see it.”
He attributes his success on social media as being the result of his straightforward, sarcastic style of speaking. “I never have a script. I am just speaking,” DeLuca said. “I am extremely sarcastic, and a lot of people like that because it puts a little bit of lightheartedness into an already difficult situation. And I’m also right to the point, and without the fluffiness that so many influencers like to use. I speak to the camera, I say what I have to say, that is it. And I think that’s really been my winning way to share information because a lot of people … they just want to hear it clearly, have it be understandable if they have no knowledge of that region.”
I speak to the camera, I say what I have to say, that is it. And I think that’s really been my winning way to share information because a lot of people … they just want to hear it clearly, have it be understandable if they have no knowledge of that region.
DeLuca’s thoughts on the allegations that Israel and her defenders are “pinkwashing”? “Pinkwashing has got to be one of the stupidest things that I’ve ever heard … I grew up in Israel. In the ‘90s, I fought for gay rights. I marched in the first Pride parade,” he said. “When people tell me I’m just pinkwashing something — meaning that I’m talking about the successes of my community as a smokescreen as to not talk about what’s happening in Gaza or the West Bank — that is one of the most ridiculous homophobic and antisemitic things. What I did, the [fights] that I fought, were not so that I had to hide what was happening… in Gaza or the West Bank, I was doing it because that’s the right thing to do and I wanted to fight for my rights. So pinkwashing, in a word, is bulls—.”
The pro-Israel influencer says that he welcomes anti-Israel protesters who come to his speaking events on campuses, “because those are the people that I want to hear, and I want to try to change their mind. Or at least plant a seed so that they think, ‘wait, I heard a different side of it. I might be wrong, let me research a little bit more.’”
DeLuca believes that antisemitism is “much worse” in Canada than it is in the United States. “Here I find, states have a little more power vs. the federal government. In Canada, it’s very much our federal government [that] is the problem,” he opined, citing “our immigration laws allowing the protests to be as antisemitic as they are … Because we have an election coming up next year … there are a lot of people pandering to a demographic of a community that would rather see me dead, and they’re doing nothing about it,” DeLuca said.
DeLuca also pointed out that unlike the United States, Canada has hate speech laws, but they haven’t been enforced against antisemitism since Oct. 7, as there are people walking around with swastikas and saying things like “Heil Hitler.” “Nothing is ever done about it,” DeLuca lamented.
DeLuca has visited the site of the Nova music festival as well as the southern communities that were attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7. Visiting the Nova site was particularly difficult for him because “growing up, that was me. I was one of those kids that was in those forest parties every weekend … everybody there [at the Nova festival] was so young. Everybody there was a kid. Everybody there was literally starting their lives out. They were literally in the army or just after the army, and had their entire life ahead of them. And knowing that these hang gliders came over and people saw them and thought it was part of the festival … to be gunned down like that, literally sitting ducks, that was probably the most difficult thing for me.”
Prior to Oct. 7, DeLuca was “scared for my country because it was so divided.” But after Oct. 7, the Jewish state flipped “into a country that was united. And that’s I think the secret of Israel … we are very different, we are multicultural, we are multifaceted, we have different ideas, we have returned from all parts of the world. But if you push us, we’re one unit.”
As for the communities that were attacked, DeLuca visited one three weeks after Oct. 7 and recalled a particularly pungent smell. A doctor there told him that it was “the calcification of bone fragments that had been blown into the wall. They couldn’t even get them out of the wall,” DeLuca said, adding “I’ve been to Europe. I’ve seen the camps. The camps are nothing compared to what I saw the three weeks after.”
People in Israel, he said, want the war to end so they can return to their homes in the north and in the south. “We need to a) get rid of Hamas… b) bring our hostages back… and finally hopefully we see in Gaza a government that is at least, even if they don’t love Israel, tolerates the fact that we’re there,” DeLuca said.
But “Israel is coming back to what it was” prior to Oct. 7. “If you are in Tel Aviv, you would never know that there is anything happening,” DeLuca said. For a while after Oct. 7, Tel Aviv was “like a ghost town,” but now “it’s back to itself,” he added.
DeLuca’s message to the students at the CAMERA on Campus conference and any other students gearing up to deal with anti-Israel protesters on their respective campuses in the fall: “As hard as you think you have it, think about your brothers and sisters back home who are literally losing their lives. To have to go to a protest or to speak to somebody or to yell over somebody or to explain facts to somebody, is such a small thing to do when you think about the grand scale of what the overall war is.”
This article was originally published in the Jewish Journal (Los Angeles).
