Earlier this week we got a chance to work a little bit with Noam Bedein, the founder and director of the Sderot Media Center. This 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. 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. If you hear about an interview conducted with a family that lost their house to a direct hit, that's because one of Bedein's people was there within a few minutes of the attack. The pictures above were taken by him, and the Center webpage has hundreds more along with film. 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.

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. More materially, a lot of people think that the new shelters announced for Sderot this morning are the result of pressure brought to bear on the government by the SMC's work. But the Palestinians are still managing to get at Israeli schoolchildren with rockets:

It's hard to actually visualize just how bad things have gotten without seeing some of Bedein's presentations. You see kids 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.

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.

References:
* Sderot Media Center
* Sderot to get 15 new protective shelters [JPost]
* Sderot schools launch strike [YNet]

Previously:
* BREAKING: Major Injuries In Sderot Rocket Barrage. Children Wounded As Rockets Score Direct Hits On School and Home.
* Islamic Jihad Rocket Hits House, Narrowly Misses Pre-School
* Campaign To Save Sderot Bakeries, Families

Cross-posted to:
* The Astute Bloggers
* Israpundit