RFK Jr. defends comments on Islamism, Al-Sayed after media criticism
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. defended his criticism of Michigan Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed after his claim that Arabs “don’t produce science” drew widespread condemnation.
In a post of more than 3,700 words on the social media platform X on Friday, Kennedy stood by his original position and urged El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee, to denounce the Muslim Brotherhood, which was formed in Egypt in 1928 as an Islamist movement.
Kennedy wrote that his speech “was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism,” which he called “a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood.”
Kennedy did not retract his comments about Arabs. He described his comments as an observation about “the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades” and accused reporters at the AP, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times and MSNOW of omitting “critical context” to make his statements look racist and Islamophobic.
“Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist,” Kennedy wrote. He called Islamism a violent distortion of mainstream Islam that pulls its followers back to a seventh-century ideal of jihad.
Kennedy traced the rise of Islamism through the Brotherhood and faulted El-Sayed for refusing to condemn an ideology he said had brought "closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression and violence," the Washington Examiner reported. He said El-Sayed had stayed silent on the group’s ideology and on Brotherhood front organizations that Kennedy linked to the candidate.
“A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only,” Kennedy wrote.
He also contrasted Muslim societies with Jewish contributions to Western civilization through the centuries, most recently in American entertainment and technology. Kennedy wrote that Jews had done more than any other ethnic or religious group for human welfare and for liberal democracy.
The post followed remarks Kennedy made last Monday in Grand Rapids, at a Michigan campaign event for El-Sayed’s Republican opponent, former Rep. Mike Rogers, Reuters reported. In that speech, Kennedy faulted El-Sayed for failing to rebuke the Brotherhood, some chapters of which the United States has designated as terrorist organizations.
Kennedy said the Brotherhood had “created stagnant societies” by combining authoritarian politics with religious fundamentalism. He said Arabs “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.”
Peter Hotez, a vaccine and tropical medicine specialist at Baylor College of Medicine, said that Ahmed Zewail, an Arab Nobel laureate and late colleague of his who died in 2016, “would disagree.” Zewail, an Egyptian American chemist, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Democrats, civil rights organizations and healthcare advocates condemned the remarks.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, called them “a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry.” CAIR has been designated a terrorist organization by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. The United Arab Emirates also designated CAIR as a terrorist organization, and there have been efforts in Congress to do the same, though no legislation has passed.
CAIR said Kennedy had falsely erased Arab contributions to humanity and was stoking hatred while Arabs and Muslims already faced bigoted attacks from other officials. Protect Our Care, a nonprofit that campaigns on healthcare, called the comments a “wildly racist tirade.”
U.S. Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who is now recovering from a stroke, had previously called Kennedy's remarks a “coordinated campaign to delegitimize Muslim Americans,” which he said targeted them both as citizens and as humans.
“It’s rich to have an anti-scientist come to Michigan to lecture a doctor with two doctoral degrees who has spent his entire career working on public health,” El-Sayed spokesperson Cole Wozniak said in a statement.
Republicans have said that El-Sayed has links to the Brotherhood.
President Trump has also called El-Sayed a “jihadist.”
El-Sayed has publicly disavowed the group and said he has no connection to it. If elected, he would be the first Muslim to serve in the U.S. Senate.
