SDEROT MEDIA CENTER: DOCUMENTING AND HELPING CHILDREN COPE WITH PALESTINIAN WAR CRIMES

The Sderot Media Center is the only group working to bring the reality faced by Sderot residents - the constant Palestinian Qassam attacks aimed indiscriminately at civilians - to the world. Their founder and director, Noam Bedein, was in the US last week to help raise awareness about this travesty.

If you see a video of 6 year olds running from their sandboxes at the sound of a Red Alert, that's because one of Bedein's teams recorded it. These kids are playing, then they hear the siren, then you watch them have 15 seconds to run for shelter. And then you see how little kids have been taught to count down from 10 and yell in song so that they don't have to hear the rockets exploding. And that's before the footage of mothers screaming and children breaking down as they try to find each other in the aftermath of a full on bombing. And they're slowly starting to get results. One of their more dramatic videos - children at a group therapy session that's interrupted by a Red Alert and falling Qassams - recently made the jump into the MSM. A lot of people think that the new shelters announced for Sderot are the result of pressure brought to bear on the government by the SMC's work.

In between documenting the effects of Palestinian terrorism and war crimes, they also do what they can to make life a little more bearable, from directly assisting families to putting on events to providing therapy for children.

When Israel finally invades the Gaza Strip to stop the Qassams - as any other country would have done months if not years ago - the world will invent an Israeli "atrocity" to scream about for a month. Then that "atrocity" will go from 40 "murdered" to 1 dead - as it did in Lebanon - or from "hundreds of civilian casualties" to dozens of dead fighters - as it did in Jenin. All that's inevitable. But in between, there will probably be a few hundred people who will see the SMC's videos and suddenly understand why Israel had to go into Gaza and be genuinely impressed by the care that the IDF takes to maintain its status as the most moral army in the world. And in the meantime, the group is doing what it can to promote public dialogue outside of Sderot and help the families and children inside the besieged town. The SMC's page for making tax deductible donations is here.

[Read an extended version of this post at Mere Rhetoric]