Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. delivered sweeping remarks about Arabs and Muslims while appearing at a Republican campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Monday, saying that “500 million Arabs” do not “produce science.” Kennedy made the remarks while discussing the Muslim Brotherhood after referencing Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who has raised the organization during his campaign against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. El-Sayed has denied having ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and has publicly disavowed the group.
That’s something I can talk about,” Kennedy said. Kennedy went on to describe people living under the organization’s influence as being inside a “death cult” and immersed in what he called an ideology of “victimization, of murder, of genocide.” Kennedy then said: “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. They don’t win the Wolf Prize.
They don’t produce literature.” Kennedy’s assertion about Nobel winners is contradicted by the Nobel Prize’s own records. Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1999, while Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. Yemeni journalist and activist Tawakkol Karman shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011.
The remarks came in Michigan, which has the highest share of residents reporting Arab ancestry of any state, at about 2.2 percent, according to 2024 American Community Survey data from the U.S. Newsweek reached out to the Rogers and El-Sayed campaigns for comment on Kennedy’s remarks. The Muslim Brotherhood has become a contentious late-stage issue in the Senate race between Rogers and El-Sayed, with Rogers and his Republican allies seeking to link the Democrat to the organization.
Kennedy has also previously spoken publicly about the Muslim Brotherhood. Earlier in October, he deleted a social media post in which he accused the organization of conducting a Qatar-funded global propaganda campaign, according to The Jerusalem Post. El-Sayed has repeatedly rejected the allegations, including publicly disavowing the Muslim Brotherhood.
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