WASHINGTON (AP) — Secretary of Health and Human Services 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, drew criticism just days before the midterm elections.
“There are 500 million Arabs in the world and yet they don’t produce science,” Kennedy said Monday during the election campaign. “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 false and racist — were made while he was campaigning in a state with a large Arab-American population.
An HHS representative did not immediately respond to an Associated Press request for comment.
Arabic refers to an ethnic and linguistic identification, while Muslim refers to a religious identity. So, although Arabs may be Muslim, Christian, Jewish or of another faith, the vast majority of Muslims in the world are not Arab.
Here’s a closer look at Kennedy’s comments.
The Arabs won the Nobel Prize
__Egyptian jurist Mohamed El Baradei, diplomat and Egyptian vice-president, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005 alongside the International Atomic Energy Agency. Baradei and the IAEA, which he previously chaired, were recognized for their efforts to prevent the use of nuclear energy for military purposes.
__Tawakkol Karman, a Yemeni journalist, politician and human rights activist, was co-recipient of the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize, becoming the first Yemeni and first Arab woman to win the prize.
__Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American scientist, received the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on femtochemistry.
__Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.
__Jordanian-born Omar M. Yaghi was one of three chemists awarded the Nobel Prize in 2025 and won the Wolf Prize in Chemistry in 2018.
__Sir Michael Atiyah, of Lebanese origin, was a Fields Medalist in 1966.
__Yasser Arafat, the former head of the Palestine Liberation Organization, received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1994, alongside former Israeli Prime Ministers Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin “for their efforts to bring peace to 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 signing the Camp David Accords, which ended the Israeli occupation of the Sinai Peninsula.
The context 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 Brotherhoodan Islamist organization.
El-Sayed, who has disavowed the group, has also been accused by President Donald Trump. to be a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Trump also made racist remarks toward 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 did not contribute to science or the humanities due to the influence of the Muslim Brotherhood, after citing the contributions of Islamic civilization to literature in the 13th century.
“This whole tradition was destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood,” Kennedy said. The United States has tagged several Middle Eastern branches of the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations. “They have created stagnant societies that do one or two things: hate, war and victimization,” Kennedy said.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in Egypt in 1928, but was banned after the ouster of Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi in 2013. Jordan announced a radical ban on the organization last year. Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain designated the organization a terrorist group in 2014.
What the critics say
Protect Our Care President Brad Woodhouse said in a statement that “this wasn’t the first time RFK Jr has trafficked in racism, but this may be his ugliest episode yet.” Woodhouse was referring to Kennedy’s comments on the “High Level Conversations” podcast in 2024, in which he implied that black children with ADHD and taking medication should be “reparented.”
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 did not 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 pass them on to the Renaissance.”
Kennedy is expected to be the special guest at the “Make Iowa Healthy Again Rally” in Des Moines on Wednesday.
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Find AP fact checks at https://apnews.com/APFactCheck.
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