Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. falsely claimed that modern Arab Muslims don’t produce science and literature as they have in the past or win prestigious prizes — remarks that have stirred a political backlash.
At a Monday event campaigning for former congressman Mike Rogers in Michigan, Kennedy spent a portion of his remarks lambasting the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement founded in Egypt in 1928 that has various offshoots. He asserted that it launched a new ideology that destroyed Islam’s contributions to art and literature and science and engineering.
As the “ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood took over in 1928 … that’s why you don’t see any Muslims, any Arab Muslims, winning the Nobel,” Kennedy said at the event for the Republican nominee who is locked in a tight race for an open Senate seat. “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 Field[s] prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, they don’t produce the literature they used to produce.”
The remarks quickly ricocheted online, as Democrats sought to highlight contributions to both fields and experts in Arab studies blasted the remarks as steeped in “ignorance” and “bigoted.”
Kennedy sought to tie Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic candidate, to the Muslim Brotherhood, which President Donald Trump has also done.
At the event that was also supporting the GOP nominee for governor, Rep. John James, Kennedy said the Muslim Brotherhood “launched a new ideology that departed from traditional Islam in a very, very dangerous way,” arguing the Muslim Brotherhood created “stagnant societies” that have “let down their own people.”
“The Muslim religion produced the Golden Age, which lasted almost a thousand years where Islamic lands were the center of the foundation for art, literature, and science and engineering,” he said.
He added, “All of that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood” and said that “talking about the Muslim Brotherhood is not Islamophobia.”
Nirav Shah, a former principal deputy director at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention who unsuccessfully ran to be Maine’s Democratic candidate for governor, wrote on X that Kennedy was “unserious and incurious about the world” and pointed to several examples of Arab scholars who have won the prize.
For instance, Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian American chemist, won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1999 and had previously spoken about his faith. Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011 and at the time had been described as the second Muslim woman to win the award.
The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Samer S. Shehata, an associate professor of Middle East studies at the University of Oklahoma, called Kennedy’s remarks “incredibly disappointing” and “bigoted.” He said there is a “long history of Arab science in the Golden Age, but also more recently, there have been Arabs who’ve contributed in major ways to science,” as well as to literature. He pointed to some such as Ibrahim Nasrallah who last year won a literature award sponsored by the University of Oklahoma.
Last year, Trump signed an executive order to begin the process of designating certain chapters of the Muslim Brotherhood as foreign terrorist organizations.
El-Sayed has denied accusations that he has personal or family ties to the movement. He dismissed past social media posts from his half sister as “hearsay,” including one in which she mentions their biological mother’s “activism in the Muslim Brotherhood during the early 70s while she was in college.” El-Sayed’s Egyptian immigrant parents divorced when he was young, he has said, and he was raised by his father and stepmother.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment. He has previously called attempts to tie him to the Muslim Brotherhood as Islamophobic and said he doesn’t want to dignify them with a response.
Michigan is a pivotal Senate race as Republicans seek to maintain control of the Senate. For Democrats, flipping the upper chamber was once viewed as a long shot, but the chances have grown in recent months.
Kennedy has been crisscrossing the country during this year’s midterm elections. In Michigan, El-Sayed, a former public health official, has attempted to make a play for supporters of Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again movement, releasing a plan in late September focusing on cracking down on pesticides, changing drinking water standards and boosting access to healthy food.
On Monday, Kennedy also criticized El-Sayed for supporting pandemic-era measures, such as lockdowns and social distancing measures, that Republicans have blasted.
On Wednesday, Kennedy is slated to appear at a rally for Republican Zach Lahn, who built his bid for Iowa governor off of bashing Big Agriculture, a stance that was once unthinkable in the Corn Belt.
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