18-Dec-12: An End-of-Year Call to Action

[We originally posted the message below six years ago on this site. It's just as relevant today in December 2012. Please read it again if you saw it in 2006. If it's not something you read then, please take a few moments now...]

For many people, we're approaching the end of the financial year. A good time to remind you of the voluntary work we (the bloggers behind this site) do and have done since September 2001.

We lost our child to an act of barbaric murder and incomprehensible hatred. Our response has been to create the Malki Foundation in our daughter's name and to raise money and distribute it very efficiently in a way that allows us to do a lot good. You can get the whole picture at the website of the Malki Foundation. But if you're click-resistant, here's the brief version.

For Israeli families (Jews, Christians, Moslems, Druze, others) who have a special-needs child like the little boy above being helped by his brother, we provide substantial subsidies to enable five kinds of therapy: physical, occupational, speech, water and horse-riding... The parents decide how much therapy, which therapies and which therapist. We aim to empower them, and certainly not to patronize or direct them. They get enough of that from the establishment.

We also provide long-term free loans of home-care equipment like beds, wheelchairs, walkers and standers. The goal, again, is to make home-care a real option for such families.

In a country which has some fine institutional solutions, we believe that home care is and always will be the best option for a child with serious disabilities. For those who agree (not everyone), we want to help in our murdered daughter's name. We are doing this today for many hundreds of families with a special-needs child.

We have a blind, severely-disabled eleven year old child [update: she's now 17] at home (she attends a special school but sleeps at home) and came by our opinions the authentic way - by living the experience, by fighting the establishment and by learning how to work around the schlerosis in the system in order to do substantial good. And for those to whom this sort of statistic is important, nearly a third of the families we support month-in, month-out are Arab.

If you're in a position to help us by making a 2006 fiscal-year donation [update: still very relevant in 2012], we can promise it will be honestly and effectively applied. And if you're living in the United States, the UK or Israel, we can provide you with a tax-deduction for your contribution. Details here.

2012 UPDATE: Please consider passing this message along to people you think might be responsive to engaging in acts of revenge of this kind. Thank you.