REGARDING EZEKIEL'S TOMB, Tamar Sternthal at CAMERA is suspicious. In response to the APF article quoted yesterday (see first link above), she writes:

The text is maddingly ambiguous; will the Kifl tomb and other historically Jewish sites be renovated to restore and maintain their original Jewish character, or will it be renovated in accord with the Muslim shrines they apparently have become? After all, given the history of Islam, this point requires careful clarification. As noted by scholar Raymond Ibrahim, Muslim conquerers have had a tendency to convert Jewish and Christian holy sites into Muslim shrines. Thus, when the Turks conquered Constantinople in the fifteenth century, the famed Hagia Sophia church, along with 500 other Christian places of worship, were converted to Muslim shrines. The Al Aqsa Mosque is deliberately built atop the ruins of the first and second Jewish temples in Jerusalem. And in more recent days, when the bloodied Israeli army withdrew from Joseph's Tomb in 2000, it was quickly turned into a mosque.

Perhaps Krauss has given away the answer, referring at one point to the revered site in Kifl as a mosque. Yet, the matter is confused when Iraqi spokesman Abdelzahra al-Talaqani is quoted: "The ministry is concerned with all Iraqi heritage, whether it is Christian or Jewish or from any other religion." Does that "concern" translate to the mission of converting abandoned non-Islamic religious sites into mosques, as is apparently the case with Ezekiel's tomb? Krauss does not spell out the answer either way and the discerning reader is left to wonder.

She has other problems with the article's portrayal of events in the twentieth century, but those need not detain us here.

For what it's worth, Arutz Sheva, which is usually quite sensitive to such issues, seems to see nothing sinister in the article. Hillel Fendel writes:

(IsraelNN.com) The American-backed Iraqi government has announced plans to restore the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel, in a small town south of Baghdad.

It is currently an Islamic shrine, but the government announcement implied that its Jewish nature would be emphasized. The interior is shaped like a synagogue, with a Turkish-style dome ceiling, old wooden cabinets that used to hold Torah scrolls, and the remains of a separation between men and women. Large Hebrew letters praising the Prophet and medieval Islamic floral designs adorn the old stone walls.

[...]

From what I've seen so far, the Jewish nature of the shrine is being respected and preserved. For my part, I am willing to give the Iraqi authorities the benefit of the doubt until and unless they give me grounds to think otherwise.