Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. slandered the entire Arabic world in a remarkably racist tangent last night while campaigning in Michigan for Republican Reps. Mike Rogers and John James.
“There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world,” RFK Jr. said, opening with the only factual part of the 30-second screed to follow.
“And yet they don’t produce science,” he continued. “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.”
Since 1978, three Arabs have won the Nobel Prize in science: Ahmed Zewail, Moungi Bawendi and Omar M. Yaghi (Zewail and Yaghi also separately won the Wolf Prize); five have won the Nobel Peace Prize: Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat, Mohamed El Baradei, Tawakkol Karman and the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet; and two have won the Nobel Prize in literature: Naguib Mahfouz and Abdulrazak Gurnah.
But Kennedy wasn’t done.
“They used to — they were the first to make books,” Kennedy said, ignoring the fact that the Arabic world still does, in fact, make books.
“In the 13th century, typical Muslim princes had more books in their libraries than existed in all of Europe,” he continued. “And all of that tradition has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood. They’ve created stagnant societies that do two things: hatred and war, and victimization.”
Here’s the clip:
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the nation’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy organization, responded by calling for Kennedy to be dismissed from Trump’s cabinet.
“To stand on a public stage as a sitting U.S. cabinet official and dehumanize half a billion people – and millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans - with fabricated, white supremacist talking points is utterly disqualifying for public office,” CAIR said in an emailed statement.
“Anyone who holds such blatant contempt for an entire ethnicity has no business leading a federal agency meant to serve all Americans.”
Brad Woodhouse, the president of left-leaning nonprofit Protect Our Care, also called out Kennedy’s wild ignorance in an emailed statement.
“Fear and racism are the crutch of pathetic political hacks with absolutely nothing to offer or progress to point to,” Woodhouse said.
“Sec. Kennedy thinks spewing hate will distract from his multiple corruption scandals and starring role in the historic measles and food-borne illness crises Americans have suffered through this year. This wasn’t the first time RFK Jr. has trafficked in racism, but it may be his ugliest episode yet.”