JC avoids mentioning lynching of a Jew in Tel Aviv

This is curious.  I was just looking at a Mondoweiss posting about the potential lynching of a guy who crash his car into a Tel Aviv restaurant after the driver suffered a heart attack.  It's worth a lengthy extract from Mondo:

Saturday night, an Israeli driver had a heart attack and lost control of his vehicle on busy Ben Yehuda street in Tel Aviv, ending up crashing into a restaurant and badly injuring two diners, who died shortly after from their wounds.

According to the wife of one of the restaurant owners, Shoshana San, who was an eyewitness, the driver was believed by restaurant-goers and others to be a terrorist. “They thought that the driver was not a good person, they beat him. He was unconscious”, she is quoted saying in the Jerusalem Online article. 

Let me translate this coded Israeli language for everyone. “Not a good person” means a Palestinian terrorist. The witnesses thought that the car ramming was an intentional Palestinian terror attack, so although the driver was already unconscious, they “pulled him out of the car” as Israeli NRG noted (Hebrew) and lynched him whilst he was unconscious.

Quite little seems to be said about this lynching. It is very toned down and mostly omitted in Israeli media coverage that I managed to glean in my search. Haaretz and Times of Israel, for example, reported about the accident on the day, stating that it wasn’t terror, and not mentioning the beating. “Six wounded; driver among the fatalities in incident unrelated to terrorism,” said Haaretz. .

Ok, so a guy has a heart attack at the wheel of his car, loses control and the car crashes into a restaurant, killing some and injuring others.  The driver was among the dead.  What killed him?  Was it the heart attack?  Was it the crash?  Or was it the beating?

If we look at the Jerusalem Online post we wouldn't even know if he got killed:

On the morning after last night’s (Saturday) deadly car crash on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, eye-witnesses are still having trouble comprehending it. According to assessments, the driver suffered a heart attack and lost control of the wheel, which caused him to run over restaurant patrons. The current terror wave attacks caused many people to think that this accident was a planned car ramming attack, which prompted several eye-witnesses to beat the driver after his car came to a stop- according to Shosha San, the wife of one of the restaurant’s owners.

In a radio interview, San recalled the accident and said that the driver was unconscious when he was beaten “by bystanders, not the restaurant staff.” San added: “I thought it was the end of the world and that I was dead, people were screaming. The restaurant was filled with white dust. At first, I thought it was maybe a terror attack.”

San said that the restaurant staff quickly reacted to the accident: “We called the Police and ambulances. We helped people, there was a lot of blood and I was scared.” According to San, other people acted differently because they thought it was a terror attack: “They thought that the driver was not a good person, they beat him. He was unconscious.” San also mentioned that the restaurant is still closed due to the serious damage caused by the accident.

No mention of the driver winding up dead but the headline points firmly to the lynching attempt:

Driver of last night’s deadly accident was beaten by eye-witnesses

Now would even a fatal car crash in Tel Aviv normally interest the UK's Jewish Chronicle?  Maybe it would and sure enough Josh Jackman did report on it on the same day as the Jerusalem Online piece. Here's the JC;

Three people have died and six were left injured after a car crashed into restaurant customers in Tel Aviv.

Alan Weinkrantz, president of a high-tech PR company, and 47-year-old Menashe Raz from Ashdod were among those killed on Saturday night.

The driver of the car, a 41-year-old from Ra’anana, was also killed.

Police reports indicated that the driver suffered a heart attack and lost control of the vehicle, careering into customers sitting outside Furama, a Chinese restaurant in the centre of the city.

A female victim in her 30s was left moderately injured, while five others were lightly hurt.

Police have opened an investigation into the incident, but it is not thought to have been a terrorist attack.

Mr Weinkrantz, a Texas resident in his 60s who was president of Alan Weinkrantz and Company, was in Israel on an annual business trip.

His son Aaron told Times of Israel: "He was planning to come back to the US on Thursday. So this has been real tough and real, just crazy."

Mr Weinkrantz also leaves behind a daughter, Lauren.

Mr Raz was preparing to leave the restaurant after a night out with his wife, three children and sister-in-law's family when the car hit.

His sister-in-law Revital, 25, and his 22-year-old niece Linoy Raz were injured and taken to hospital.

So the JC mentioned what Jerusalem Online didn't but not what the latter did report, ie, that the driver was lynched by bystanders.  Given that he is now dead as a result of something that happened to him that night it could be that he was actually killed by the people who attacked him when other witnesses said he was unconscious.  This was a car crash in a far away city where there are a lot of car crashes and a lot of resulting fatalities.  So what was of interest to the JC?  And whatever it was, why didn't they report the beating by the witnesses/bystanders?  As a far away foreigner I feel the most interesting part of the story is the lynching, not the crash itself.

By the way, the report was first written on 19 June 2016.  It was updated the following morning.  I don't know what was added, taken away or replaced.

UPDATE at 11:15 am 23/6/2016: I've now seen that Newsweek reported what the JC didn't:

The incident, which took place at the Furama Chinese restaurant on Ben Yehuda street in the coastal city, left two people in the eatery dead. The driver also succumbed to his injuries but it is unclear if the beating by the mob is what killed him, or the heart attack that preceded the crash.

So in a report that a driver who crashed his car into a restaurant in Tel Aviv may have been killed by a heart attack, the crash or by an angry mob who mistook him for an Arab, most media that I have seen only see fit to mention the crash itself and the fact that 3 people died.