Daniel Wolfram
Kennedy told a campaign crowd that an entire ethnic group lacks scientific achievement.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary, decided to skip his duties and throw his hat into the political ring as the midterms were heating up.
Kennedy joined a Republican campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, fresh off an official visit promoting hospital nutrition.
Here he campaigned with GOP hopeful Mike Rogers, but his speech quickly turned racist toward an ethnic group consisting of 500 million people.
The health secretary turns political and xenophobic
According to Newsweek, Kennedy used the appearance to attack the Muslim Brotherhood before turning his sights on the entire global Arab population. He described people under the group’s influence as trapped in a “death cult” built on “victimization, of murder, of genocide.”
Kennedy then delivered a broad assessment of hundreds of millions of people. “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science.
“They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize [sic]. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature,” he claimed.
Unfounded claims
Official Nobel Prize records immediately disprove that claim. Egyptian chemist Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999, while novelist Naguib Mahfouz claimed the literature prize in 1988. In 2011, Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman shared the Nobel Peace Prize.
The remarks landed in an especially sensitive political battleground. According to 2024 Census Bureau data, Michigan has the highest share of residents reporting Arab ancestry of any state, at about 2.2 percent. It remains a crucial voting bloc in an election year.
Rogers and his Republican allies have repeatedly tried to tie Democrat Abdul El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood. On Sunday, Rogers pushed the accusation again during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press”. He insisted key questions remain unanswered.
An ideological clash
El-Sayed has forcefully rejected any connection, calling questions about his constitutional allegiance “shameful.”
Asked directly whether he would disavow the group, El-Sayed replied: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely,” while condemning insinuations that his Muslim faith split his loyalties.
Kennedy has courted similar controversy before. Earlier this month, he deleted a social media post accusing the Muslim Brotherhood of running a foreign propaganda campaign, according to The Jerusalem Post.
