RFK Jr.: Arabs 'Don't Produce Science,' 'Win the Nobel'

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is taking heat over broad assertions about Arab contributions to humanity's scientific and literary discoveries that the Council on American-Islamic ‌Relations calls "a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry," reports Reuters. A look, per the AP:

• Kennedy's comments: "There's 500 million Arabs in the world and yet they don't produce science," he said on the campaign trail Monday in Michigan, home to a large Arab-American population. "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."

Arabs have won the Nobel

• Egyptian law scholar Mohamed El Baradei, a diplomat and VP of Egypt, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 alongside the International Atomic Energy Agency.
• Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, politician, and human rights activist, was a co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
• 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, with former Israeli PMs Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin for "efforts to achieve peace in the Middle East."
• Former Egyptian President Anwar al-Sadat was a co-recipient of the Nobel with then-Israeli PM Menachem Begin in 1978 after they signed the Camp David Accords.

Background of RFK's comments

• Kennedy spoke while campaigning for Michigan Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers, who has accused opponent Abdul El-Sayed of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. "Mike Rogers was talking about the Muslim Brotherhood. That's something I can talk about," Kennedy said. After citing Islamic civilization's contributions to literature in the 13th century, he said, "All that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood. They've created stagnant societies that do one, two things: hatred and war and victimization."

Critics

• Protect Our Care president Brad Woodhouse said "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 2024 comments, in which 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 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."