It happened again in 2016, repeating a trend that has been ongoing for at least 10 years.

According to the latest Toronto Police Service (TPS) hate crime report — on the agenda of this week’s police services board meeting — Jews were the most targeted group in Toronto when it came to acts of hate crime last year.

Some 43 of 145 offences or nearly 30% of all occurrences reported to police in 2016 involved attacks on the Jewish community, mostly pertaining to vandalism and graffiti or criminal harassment.

The LGBT community was a far distance behind at 24 or 17% of all occurrences followed by 22 occurrences each against Muslims and blacks, amounting to 15% of all incidents reported.

Hate crimes against Jews are up 7% from last year and the police report that the Jewish community has been among the three most targeted groups (including the black and LGBT communities) since 2006.

None of this surprises me in the slightest given the rise in anti-Semitism dressed in the guise of an anti-Israel, pro-BDS, pro-free speech movement that has found a home amongst alleged Liberal thinkers on university campuses and in union and feminist-backed solidarity movements across Canada, the United States and western Europe.

I saw and heard the anti-Israel rhetoric at the recent International Women’s Day rally at U of T of largely self-described oppressed socialist man-haters.

And how can we ignore the recent spate of bomb threats targeted at Jewish Community Centres in Toronto, across Canada and in the States.

Let’s face it, we Jews are dispensable.

One doesn’t have to look any further than how this rise in anti-Semitism is being treated, or rather not treated, at all three levels of government.

While our politicians at City Hall, Queen’s Park and in Ottawa make a big show of pandering to political correctness when it comes to perceived Islamophobia and about battling other forms of racism, anti-Semitism seems not to be on their radar at all.

Let’s start with the very controversial M-103 anti-Islamophobia motion introduced by Liberal MP Iqra Khalid. A recent poll says only 14% of Canadians support it and a whopping 71% say either take out the focus on Islam and/or mention all religions.

Or take Michael Coteau, Ontario’s anti-racism minister. When he released his new three-year plan to combat varying forms of racism two weeks ago, there was plenty in it about racism against Indigenous people, blacks and Islamophobia but not a word, from what I could see, about the rise in anti-Semitism.

Ironically our provincial champion of anti-racism launched his plan on the day Toronto’s downtown Jewish Community Centre was targeted with a bomb threat and barely made mention of it.

Ditto for Toronto City Hall which has launched a five-phase Toronto for All education campaign — costing $80,000 per phase — to target Islamophobia and anti-black racism while conspicuously ignoring the rise in anti-Semitism in the city.

Just last week when brave 19-year-old Ryerson student Marlee Socket organized a rally against anti-Semitism in front of the downtown JCC, not one politician showed except for Mayor John Tory.

Not one city councillor showed their face especially the one whose ward contains the JCC and continually preaches tolerance for whatever cause he supports, NDPer Joe Cressy.

Not Premier Kathleen Wynne, who rushed to a Toronto mosque and donned the appropriate headgear to console the Muslim community following the tragic massacre at the end of January at a Quebec City mosque.

Not Coteau. Not any Liberal from Trudeau’s caucus, including Jewish MP Michael Levitt.

Need I say more.

It’s shocking to think but it’s like anti-Semitism is so ingrained in our culture, it doesn’t matter to our politicians anymore.

SLevy@postmedia.com