RFK Jr. Tells Michigan Rally Arabs 'Don't Produce Science.' Arab Nobel Winners Say Otherwise

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a Republican crowd in Grand Rapids, Michigan, on Monday, Oct. 26, that Arabs "don't produce science."

"There's 500 million Arabs in the world and yet they don't produce science," Kennedy said. "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 claim is checkable, and it fails the check.

The prize record

Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988. Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail won the 1999 Nobel in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry.

Jordanian-born chemist Omar M. Yaghi won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018. He was one of three chemists awarded the Nobel in 2025. Sir Michael Atiyah, of Lebanese descent, won the Fields Medal in 1966.

There are also Peace Prize winners: Mohamed ElBaradei in 2005, Yemen's Tawakkol Karman in 2011, Yasser Arafat in 1994 and Anwar Sadat in 1978. Karman was the first Arab woman to win the award.

That covers a Nobel in science, a Nobel in literature, a Wolf Prize and a Fields Medal. Every category Kennedy named has an Arab winner.

Why he said it

Kennedy was campaigning for Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee. Rogers has accused his Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, of ties to the Muslim Brotherhood. El-Sayed has disavowed the group. President Trump has also accused El-Sayed of being a member.

Kennedy framed his remarks as a response to that. "Mike Rogers was talking about the Muslim Brotherhood. That's something I can talk about," he said.

His argument was that the Brotherhood, founded in Egypt in 1928, destroyed a once-great intellectual tradition. After citing Islamic civilization's literary contributions in the 13th century, he said: "All that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood." He said the group created "stagnant societies that do one, two things: hatred and war and victimization."

Other parts of the speech, as relayed by the Daily Wire, were aimed squarely at the group. Kennedy called the Brotherhood a "death cult" and said that "talking about the Muslim Brotherhood is not Islamophobia."

He also pointed to the collapse of Jewish communities in Arab countries. "In 1948, there were 950,000 Jews. How many of them are there today? Maybe a couple hundred," he said, adding that there were 250,000 in Egypt and 100,000 in Iraq in 1948.

The Brotherhood is not the issue

Criticizing the Muslim Brotherhood is a mainstream position. The United States has designated several Middle Eastern branches as terrorist organizations. Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Bahrain designated the group as terrorist in 2014. Jordan announced a sweeping ban last year. Egypt banned it after President Mohamed Morsi, a Brotherhood ally, was ousted in 2013.

But Kennedy's line was not about one organization. It was about "500 million Arabs," a group defined by language and ethnicity. Arab is not a religious category. Arabs can be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or of another faith, and most of the world's Muslims are not Arab.

A fair defense of Kennedy is that the surrounding speech was about Brotherhood ideology and about Islam's historical Golden Age, which he described as a nearly thousand-year foundation for art, literature, science and engineering. The sentence that drew the criticism was still a blanket statement about hundreds of millions of people, and the prize record does not support it.

The reaction

Critics condemned the remarks overnight as untrue and racially biased. Brad Woodhouse, president of the advocacy group Protect Our Care, 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 pointed to Kennedy's 2024 appearance on the "High Level Conversations" podcast, where Kennedy implied that Black children with ADHD who are on medication should be "re-parented."

An HHS representative did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.

The setting

The event took place in a state with a large Arab American population, with the midterm elections set for Tuesday, Nov. 3. The Daily Wire reported that Kennedy appeared alongside Rogers and Republican gubernatorial hopeful John James.

Kennedy is a cabinet secretary. His job is running a health department, not litigating the history of Arab science. Rogers, James and the Trump campaign operation have not been reported to have said whether they stand by the sweeping line or only the Brotherhood argument. The race against El-Sayed, who has denied any Brotherhood ties, ends at the ballot box on Nov. 3.