June 10, 2005 ADL honors Turkish PM for Turkey's WWII role By URIEL HEILMAN NEW YORK Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan received an award here on Friday from the Anti-Defamation League for the efforts of Turks who saved Jews during the Holocaust. The award ceremony in New York came at the tail end of Edrogan's trip last week to the United States, where he met last Wednesday with President George W. Bush at the White House. At that meeting, Bush reportedly pledged to help thwart Kurdish militants from entering Turkey from Iraq and thanked Edrogan for Turkey's contribution to security in Afghanistan, where Turkish forces constitute the largest NATO contingent there apart from the United States. ADL's award to Edrogan comes just weeks after a visit by the Turkish prime minister to Israel, which shored up the strategic alliance between the two Middle Eastern countries. "The Turkish nation has been living for centuries with the Jewish people and will continue its close and friendly relations with them in the future," Edrogan said upon receiving ADL's Courage to Care Award honoring Turkish diplomats for the role they played in saving Jews during World War II. During the Holocaust, Turkey rescued some 15,000 Turkish Jews from France and helped provide safe haven to some 100,000 Jews from elsewhere in Europe, according to Stanford J. Shaw, author of "Turkey and the Holocaust: Turkey's Role in Rescuing Turkish and European Jewry from Nazi Persecution, 1933-1945." One of the Turkish diplomats who helped rescue 42 Rhodesian Jews among some 1,700 who had been rounded up by the Nazis, Selahattin Ulkumen, then the Turkish consul of Rhodes, received ADL's Courage to Care award in 1988. On Friday, Edrogan also spoke out forcefully against anti-Semitism. "Anti-Semitism is a manifestation of a criminal disease of mind. It is a perversion that kills. It cannot be tolerated, justified nor left unchallenged," Edrogan said. "Anti-Semitism has no place in Turkey. It is alien to our culture. Islam is a religion of tolerance which recognizes people-be they Jews, Christians or Muslims-as equal." "Our consistent policy towards anti-Semitic diatribes can be nothing short of zero tolerance," he said. ADL national director Abraham Foxman praised Edrogan, saying Turkey "was one of the tiny handful of nations who acted in the name of conscience and community" while Europe's Jews were being murdered by the millions. Neither Edrogan nor the ADL made any mention of the other genocide involving the Turks: the Armenian genocide of 1915-1923. In that violence, Turks killed more than 1 million Armenians and displaced hundreds of thousands in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. Foxman later told The Jerusalem Post the Armenian genocide was not relevant to the discussion of Turkey's role in the Jewish genocide. "Why would it come up? We were honoring the Turks for helping Jews in the Holocaust," he said. Noting that Armenians who seek to have their genocide recognized by Turkey do not raise the issue of anti-Semitism, Foxman added, "The Armenians have an issue with Turkey, and I respect that, but that's not our issue."