WASHINGTON: Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s broad assertions about Arab contributions to humanity’s scientific and literary discoveries at a Republican campaign event in Grand Rapids, Michigan, have drawn criticism just days before midterm elections.
“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world and yet they don’t produce science,” Kennedy said on the campaign trail, Monday. “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.”
The health secretary’s comments — widely condemned overnight by critics as untrue and racially biased — were made while campaigning in a state with a large Arab American population.
An HHS representative did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.
Arab refers to an ethnic and linguistic identification, while Muslim refers to a religious identity. So while Arabs can be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or of another faith, the vast majority of Muslims worldwide are not Arab.
Here’s a closer look at Kennedy’s comments.
Arabs have won the Nobel Prize
__Egyptian law scholar Mohamed El Baradei, a diplomat and vice president of Egypt, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 alongside the International Atomic Energy Agency. Baradei and the IAEA, which he previously chaired, were awarded for their efforts to prevent nuclear energy from being used for military purposes.
__Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, politician, and human rights activist, was a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni and the first Arab woman to win the award.
__Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American scientist, was awarded the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry. Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988.
__Jordanian-born Omar M. Yaghi was one of three chemists awarded the Nobel Prize in 2025, and won the 2018 Wolf Prize in Chemistry. Sir Michael Atiyah, of Lebanese descent, was a Fields medalist in 1966.
__Yasser Arafat, the former head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, together with former Israeli Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East.” Arafat died in 2004.
__Former Egyptian President Anwar Al-Sadat was a co-recipient of the Nobel Prize with then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin in 1978 after they signed the Camp David Accords, which ended Israel’s occupation of the Sinai Peninsula.
The background of his comments
Kennedy made the comments while campaigning for Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who has accused his opponent, Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, of having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist organization.
El-Sayed, who has disavowed the group, has also been accused by President Donald Trump of being a Muslim Brotherhood member. Trump has also made racist comments about El-Sayed.
“Mike Rogers was talking about the Muslim Brotherhood. That’s something I can talk about,” Kennedy said. Kennedy argued that the world’s 500 million Arabs have not contributed to science or the humanities due to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, after he cited Islamic civilization’s contributions to literature in the 13th century.
“All that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Kennedy said. The US has labeled several Middle Eastern branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. “They’ve created stagnant societies that do one, two things: hatred and war and victimization,” Kennedy said.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928 but was banned in that country in 2013. Jordan announced a sweeping ban on the organization last year. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain designated the organization as a terrorist group in 2014.
What critics are saying
Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse said in a statement that “this wasn’t the first time RFK Jr has trafficked in racism, but it may be his ugliest episode yet.” Woodhouse was referring to Kennedy’s comments on the “High Level Conversations” podcast in 2024, where he implied that Black children with ADHD and on medication should be “re-parented.”
Dr. Peter Hotez, founding dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor and Texas Children’s Hospital, posted on social media Monday evening that his former colleague, Nobel Prize winner Zewail, would disagree with Kennedy.
“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.”
Kennedy is slated to serve as a special guest at the “Make Iowa Healthy Again Rally” in Des Moines on Wednesday.