Kennedy's Remarks on Arabs at Michigan Campaign Event Draw Rebuke

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the US health secretary, said at a campaign event on Monday night that Arabs do not produce science or win major prizes. Civil rights groups, healthcare advocates and Democrats criticised the remarks, and the backlash continued through Wednesday.

Kennedy spoke in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in support of Mike Rogers, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Michigan. According to The Guardian, Kennedy said Arabs do not win the Nobel Prize, the Fields Prize in mathematics or the Wolf Prize, and do not produce literature. He referred to 500 million Arabs when he said they "don't produce science." He also claimed that Arabs have not made contributions to math, and blamed the Muslim Brotherhood in his remarks.

The Associated Press published a factcheck on Tuesday showing that Arabs have won or been short-listed for those science and literature awards in recent years. Among past Nobel laureates are Mohamed ElBaradei, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005, and Ahmed Zewail, who was awarded a Nobel Prize for his studies of the transition states of chemical reactions using femtosecond spectroscopy, a method for studying very fast reactions.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations called the remarks a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry. Protect Our Care, a healthcare advocacy organization, condemned them as a wildly racist tirade.

Hillary Scholten, the Democratic congresswoman who represents west Michigan, said in a post to her Facebook page late on Tuesday that the comments were disgraceful and had no place in public service.

Rogers's Democratic opponent, Abdul El-Sayed, is Muslim, and Kennedy's remarks addressed both Arabs and Muslims. On Sunday, at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, President Donald Trump described El-Sayed as a jihadist who was on the side of the terrorists.

Asked about El-Sayed's faith, Rogers said, "It's not about how you pray, it's about how you think."