Since when could you be classified as a victim after invading most of the Middle East and southeast Europe, committing slavery and genocide? The true victims were those colonised by the Ottoman Empire, particularly those subjected to genocide on the basis of their faith and ethnicity, which are Armenians, Assyrians, Pontic Greeks and Lebanese Maronites. Furthermore, I have a hard time understanding why the Ottomans were portrayed as victims through this 'documentary'. To deny or even justify this is evil of the highest form. Rageh and the BBC can obfuscate this as much as they like for their own political ends, but the wholesale slaughter and destruction of an ethnic group and its culture is certainly genocide. To most people and historians the deliberate murder of 75% of an ethnic group with the purpose of wiping them out constitutes genocide. Suleiman I, who ruled the empire when it was at its zenith in the 16th century, had a reign of 46 years, the longest in Ottoman history. The most disturbing part for me was watching Rageh Omaar question whether the slaughter of Armenians by the Ottomans was genocide. Much of Kurdistan was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire, centered in what is now Turkey, in the 16th century at the height of Ottoman territorial expansion. In the end I struggled to decide whether this series was meant as history or propaganda. A 1873 studio portrait of three married women from Diyarbakir Province in the Ottoman Empire: Kurdish (left), Muslim (center), and Christian (right).
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