Madonna during visit to Malawi in 2007. Siphiwe Sibeko/ReutersMadonna’s plans to build a school for girls in Malawi have been abandoned, after major problems emerged in the handling of finances for the charity organization ‘Raising Malawi’. We have contributed to the project and covered it from the beginning.

There are no charges that Madonna engaged in any improper activities and despite what some have claimed in the controversial project, the NY Times reports that besides lending her name and reputation to the project, Madonna donated $11 million of her own money to the organization that she founded with Michael Berg, a co-director of the Kabbalah Centre in Los Angeles.

Madonna attended two ceremonies at what would have been the site of the school in Lilongwe and she has adopted two children from Malawi.

Critics correctly challenged Madonna to produce financial documents for the charity in articles and in commentary on AOC. A record of those events are in our own writing, and I defended Madonna more than once.

From my studying of the issues around Raising Malawi, I felt that critics were going after Madonna personally and also her association with Jewish mysticism, which riles more than a few highly religious Jews and also staunch Conservatives.