RFK Jr. Condemned Over Baseless and ‘Nakedly Racist’ Anti-Arab Rant at Rogers

Yves here. Wowsers. RFK Jr. demonstrates the degree to which Trump team members will disgrace themselves for the cause. Even the inept and incompetent Scott Bessent was a bit less so before he decided to have Treasury fall in with the Trump/Hegseth bullying as strategy.

Not only did RFK Jr., a man with worms in his brain, deny significant intellectual contributions by Arabs (Palestine alone has produced Mahmoud Darwish, Edward Said, Ibrahim Fawal, and Suad Amiry) but he pooh poohed their scientific/technical prowess. Un, those sandal-wearing Ansar Allah forces are very skilled at what the West likes to call innovation as well as manufacturing, as demonstrated by their largely indigenous drone and missile program. Underestimate those brown people at your peril.

By Julia Conley, a senior editor and staff writer for Common Dreams. Originally published at Common Dreams

Visiting the state with the highest percentage of Arab Americans to campaign for the Republican US Senate candidate, a week before the midterm elections during a campaign in which people from across the political spectrum have recoiled at the GOP’s racist, misogynist rhetoric, the Trump administration’s top health official opted to share a fact-free non sequitur about hundreds of millions of Arabs across the globe.

Apparently trying to sell voters in Michigan on Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers, who was behindDemocratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed by two points in a recent Marist poll—and by six points among independents—Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. opined on “500 million Arabs in the world,” a vast population that he suggested contributes little to the global community.

“They 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,” declared Kennedy at a campaign event in Grand Rapids.

RFK: “There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world. And yet they don’t produce science. They don’t win the Novel Prize. They don’t win the Fields Prize. They don’t win the Wolf Prize. They don’t produce literature.” https://t.co/ikZHqklQjE

— Bulwark Clips (@BulwarkClips) October 26, 2026

“Besides being nakedly racist and bigoted, this is just hilariously wrong on all levels,” said Justin Baragona of Zeteo News.

Baragona was among the observers who did not have reach far back in history to prove Kennedy, who has been widely condemned for his rejection of scientific evidence as he has questioned the safety of vaccines, entirely wrong about Arab people’s contributions to the field.

Just last year, Omar Yaghi won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for the development of metal-organic frameworks. Yaghi was born in Jordan to Palestinian refugee parents. He also won the Wolf Prize, an international award for achievements in sciences and the arts, in 2018, for his contributions to the field of reticular chemistry.

Vaccine scientist Peter Hotez expressed relief that his late colleague and “brilliant co-US Science Envoy,” the Egyptian-American chemist Ahmed Zewail, “didn’t have to endure” listening to Kennedy’s comments. Zewail won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1999.

Entrepreneur Saad Mohseni listed a number of other “Arab science giants” who came to mind.

Arab science giants:
* Ibn al-Haytham – father of optics
* Al-Kindi – invented cryptanalysis
* Al-Zahrawi – father of surgery
* Ibn al-Nafis – mapped pulmonary circulation
* Al-Battani – measured the solar year
* Ibn al-Shatir – pre-Copernican astronomy
* Ibn Khaldun – father of sociology
Nobel science laureates of Arab heritage:
* Peter Medawar 🇱🇧 – Medicine ’60, transplant immunology
* E.J. Corey 🇱🇧 – Chemistry ’90, organic synthesis
* Ahmed Zewail 🇪🇬 – Chemistry ’99, femtochemistry
* Moungi Bawendi 🇹🇳 – Chemistry ’23, quantum dots
* Omar Yaghi 🇯🇴🇵🇸 – Chemistry ’25, MOFs

— Saad Mohseni (@saadmohseni) October 27, 2026

Baragona also pointed to two winners of the National Book Award just last year—the Lebanese writer and painter Rabih Alameddine and Egyptian-American journalist Omar El Akkad.

But US Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) suggested that beyond debunking Kennedy’s wholly inaccurate claim, “everyone needs to pay attention” to what his comments were part of: a “coordinated campaign to delegitimize Muslim Americans—not just as citizens but as humans.”

“These increasingly hysterical attacks are a prelude to Republicans bringing us to a very, very dark place after the election,” said Murphy.

The Council on American Islamic Relations demanded that Kennedy be removed from his Cabinet position in light of the remarks, which they called “a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry.”

“To stand on a public stage as a sitting US 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,” said the group. “His sweeping erasure of Arab contributions to humanity is not only maliciously false, but it also fans the flames of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hate at a time when communities are already vulnerable to bigoted attacks from other public officials nationwide. Anyone who holds such blatant contempt for an entire ethnicity has no business leading a federal agency meant to serve all Americans.”

Journalist Mehdi Hasan, the founder of Zeteo News, suggested that the Democratic Party and liberal commentators deserve a large share of the blame for a political environment in which a top US official felt comfortable openly degrading hundreds of millions of people of Arab descent, including an estimated 3.7 million Arab Americans, as non-contributing members of society.

“Every day, a prominent Republican—the president, a Cabinet official, a primetime Fox host, the Michigan Senate candidate—says something insanely racist about Muslims or Arabs. Meanwhile, my timeline is full of prominent Democrats and liberals getting mad about a random ad attacking Israel and screaming about antisemitism,” he said, referring to an ad recently released by Rebellion political action committee, which criticized US aid to Israel and tied it to Americans’ struggles with the rising cost of living.

From many liberal commentators, said Hasan, he has heard “crickets… on the out-of-control Islamophobia from the GOP.”

Kennedy’s anti-Arab comments were hardly an outlier in the Michigan Senate campaign. Rogers and President Donald Trump have both accused El-Sayed of supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, despite the fact that in 2012, as a congressman, Rogers himself said he was willing to work with the movement. The president has openly called the Michigan-born El-Sayed a “jihadist,” and a speaker at one Rogers rally over the weekend said the candidate’s birth certificate did not make him an American.

But prominent Democrats have also had a hand in pushing the narrative that El-Sayed is a risky choice for Michiganders. Former state Democratic Party chair Lon Johnson accused El-Sayed of “extremism” last week and said his criticism of Israel threatens Jewish communities, calling on Democrats in the state to “leave the Senate race blank.” During the primary, the centrist think tank Third Way spent months attacking El-Sayed for campaigning with popular streamer Hasan Piker, who once said that the US “deserved” the September 11 attacks—a comment he later clarified and apologized for.

At Protect Our Care, an advocacy group that typically focuses on Kennedy’s attacks on public health, president Brad Woodhouse said Tuesday that with his remarks in Grand Rapids, the health secretary had “laid bare how small and ignorant he really is.”

“Fear and racism are the crutch of pathetic political hacks with absolutely nothing to offer or progress to point to,” said Woodhouse. “This is his closing argument for why Republicans need more power, smearing an entire people with gross and instantly disprovable lies? Really?”

“Secretary Kennedy thinks spewing hate will distract people from his multiple corruption scandals and starring role in the historic measles and food-borne illness crises Americans have suffered through this year,” he added. “This wasn’t the first time RFK Jr has trafficked in racism, but it may be his ugliest episode yet. It’s an indictment of both Mike Rogers and [Republican US Rep.] John James that they haven’t condemned the remarks. They’d rather clap like seals and hope RFK’s racist ‘hail mary’ pays off for them politically. That makes them just as weak, pathetic, and un-American.”