Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr is facing calls to be fired after claiming Arabs do not produce great contributions to science or literature.
Kennedy was in Michigan, on Monday to visit the headquarters of Corewell Health to discuss improving hospital food when he was asked about the state’s midterms Senate battle between Republican Mike Rogers and Democrat Abdul El-Sayed.
The latter, a progressive former public health official, has faced repeated attacks from the right, with President Donald Trump calling him a “Jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member” and suggesting he would have to pass through a metal detector before being allowed into the U.S. Senate.
El-Sayed has repeatedly denied any association with the Islamist group. Kennedy, speaking in Grand Rapids, told his audience it was founded in 1928 and offered “a new ideology that departed from traditional Islam in a very, very dangerous way”.
He claimed it was a “death cult” that had victimized Palestinians and left Arabic culture “atrophied and stagnant” after a millennia of high culture.
“That’s why you don’t see any Muslims, any Arab Muslims winning the Nobel,” he claimed.
“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world,” Kennedy continued. “And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Nobel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.”
He went on to claim modern Islamist groups delivered only “hate, war and victimization.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, called for RFK Jr to be fired over the inaccurate comments.
“To stand on a public stage as a sitting U.S. cabinet official and dehumanize half a billion people – and millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans – with fabricated, white supremacist talking points is utterly disqualifying for public office,” CAIR said in a statement.
“His sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously false, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a time when communities are already vulnerable to bigoted attacks from other public officials nationwide.”
Jenin Younes, President and Legal Director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee also condemned the secretary’s comments.
“Blaming Islam or the Muslim Brotherhood for Nobel outcomes is blatant anti-Arab bigotry, not to mention factually inaccurate,” he told The Independent:
“Arabs and Muslims, both from the Middle East and living elsewhere, have made and continue to make significant contributions to science, literature, mathematics, and more.”
RFK Jr faced further backlash on social media. Scientist Prof Peter Hotez posted on X: “My late colleague and brilliant co U.S. Science Envoy with me in the Obama Admin the @Caltech Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Ahmed Zewail would disagree.
“God rest his soul he didn’t have to endure this, and of course RFK Jr forgets that it was the Arab scientists of the Middle Ages who kept Aristotle, Hippocrates, Galen alive to hand it down in the Renaissance.”
Journalist Mehdi Hasan was among the many social media users who pointed out previous Arab prize winners: “One of the men who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last year was a Palestinian-American, Omar Yaghi.”
Other noteable Arab Nobel winners include Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, his countryman Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999, Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman was a joint recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.
Prominent Arab scientists include Lebanese geneticist Huda Zoghbi, Moroccan scientist Rachid Yazami and Egyptian astronomer Farouk El-Baz, all of whom have made major contributions to their respective fields and enjoyed distinguished careers in the U.S.
As for literature, celebrated Arabic writing stretches from the One Thousand and One Nights to The Golden Ode by Imrul Qays and The Epistle of Forgiveness by Abu Al Alaa Al Maarri to, more recently, Mahfouz’s celebrated Cairo Trilogy (1956-57), Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North (1966) and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013).
Kennedy was speaking in a state that has the largest Arab population in the U.S. – the community accounting for 2.2 percent of its total citizens, according to 2024 American Community Survey data from the U.S. Census Bureau – of which El-Sayed is a part.
The candidate has previously called Rogers’ attempt to associate him with the Muslim Brotherhood “shameful” and recently accepted a challenge by a voter at a town hall in Caro inviting him to disavow the organization.
“You’re asking the question because implicitly you assume that I’ll have dual loyalties,” the Democrat said to the attendee. “You assume that somehow I wouldn’t disavow. Or that I’ll have some higher order, allegiance than to the Constitution.
“I’m gonna swear an oath to the Constitution of the United States. And that Constitution guarantees us all the right to practice whatever faith we want or no faith at all.”
The Independent has reached out to Kennedy for comment.
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