Never mind that the Ottomans went on violent, genocidal purge of Christians. They were ethnically diverse and tolerant, while the British empire were brutal colonialists who left behind a legacy of meritocracy and rule of law. If only those evil brits have just genocided throughout their empire they could be looked up to like the Ottomans. /sarc
Isn't that a sickening whitewashing of history? Prof. Victor Hanson expounds on the evil of the islamic Janissary system quite often. For those who don't know, here are some excerpts from Wiki...
"Janissaries began as elite corps made up through the devşirme system of child levy enslavement, by which Christian Albanians, Bulgarians, Croats, Greeks, Romanians, Serbs and Ukrainians were taken, levied, subjected to forced circumcision and conversion to Islam, and incorporated into the Ottoman army.Prof. Hanson points out how bad it was for the Christian regions and cities to be invaded by islamic Turk armies equipped with blond, blue-eyed men who had been kidnapped as children, enslaved, and converted to islam.The formation of the Janissaries has been dated to the reign of Murad I (1362–1389), the third ruler of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans instituted a tax of one-fifth on all slaves taken in war, and from this pool of manpower the sultans first constructed the Janissary corps as a personal army loyal only to the sultan.
From the 1380s to 1648, the Janissaries were gathered through the devşirme system, which was abolished in 1648. This was the taking (enslaving) of non-Muslim boys, notably Anatolian and Balkan Christians; Jews were never subject to devşirme.
...the Turkish administrators would scour their regions (but especially the Balkans) every five years for the strongest sons of the sultan's Christian subjects. These boys (usually between the ages of 10 and 20) were then taken from their parents, circumcised, and sent to Turkish families in the provinces to be raised as Muslims and learn Turkish language and customs...Most were of non-Muslim origin because it was not permissible to enslave a Muslim.
"embraced ethnic diversity and religious tolerance" -- what absolute balderdash!