On Monday, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan received the Al-Gaddafi International Prize for Human Rights. Past recipients of the award named for the Libyan dictator include such renowned human rights abusers as former Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.

It’s hardly shocking that in a world where countries like Libya win seats on the UN Human Rights Council and Saudi Arabia is elected to a seat on the board of UN Women, that Gaddafi had the chutzpah to name a human rights honor after himself. However, I’m amazed that Erdogan can accept such a prize with a straight face. While he has proclaimed himself a champion against injustice, he is in reality the head of a country that sponsors the illegal occupation of northern Cyprus, persecutes its own Kurdish minority and has an appalling record on freedom of the press.

Monday’s award ceremony speaks not only to Turkey’s further movement away from the family of democratic nations and closer to totalitarian ones in the Muslim world, but also to Erdogan’s willingness to simply ignore reality. To claim he is a defender of human rights is simply absurd. It’d be fine if he lived in a fantasy world, but alas he lives in this real world, where he spends an inordinate amount of time slamming Israel for perceived rights abuses, while ignoring the actual crimes of his friends and neighbors. It comes as no surprise that in the recently released WikiLeaks, U.S. diplomats described Erdogan as a “fundamentalist” who “simply hates Israel.”

Libya giving the Turkish PM an award for human rights is like Exxon giving BP an award for environmental safety standards. It would be funny, if it weren’t true.