Why the Ottoman Empire Kept Coming Up in Kirk's Israel Debates

Showing 5 Ottoman Empire videos from Charlie Kirk's video collection.

The Ottoman Empire came up repeatedly in Charlie Kirk's debates over Israel and the Middle East, usually as a test of whether Muslim-led governance had ever treated Jewish populations well. When a student argued the Ottomans offered a historical example of peaceful coexistence, Kirk rejected the comparison directly, while both sides agreed that Muslim Spain's earlier Andalusian period, sometimes called the Golden Age of the Jews, had a stronger claim to that description. Commentators drew on the empire's more recent history too. Patrick Bet-David traced the modern instability of the Middle East to the Ottoman Empire's collapse in 1917 and 1918, when European powers redrew the region's borders and created many of the states now in conflict. Candace Owens invoked the Ottomans as one entry in a longer list of empires, alongside the Persian, Egyptian, and Mongol empires, that she argued critics selectively ignore when discussing history's atrocities because the perpetrators weren't European. Brandon Tatum made a different argument built on the same reference, framing the Ottoman Empire's eventual decline as part of a pattern he sees among nations that persecuted Jewish populations, contrasted with the prosperity of countries that maintain alliances with Israel today.