The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) wants President Donald Trump to fire Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. The group made the demand after he told a Michigan rally that Arabs produce no science or literature, a claim the Nobel record contradicts.
How Kennedy’s Michigan speech drew condemnation from CAIR
Kennedy was campaigning in Michigan for Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers and Republican Congressman John James. Rogers faces Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in the November election. Kennedy then turned to the Arab world, beginning with a population figure. “There’s five hundred million Arabs in the world,” he said. He followed this by claiming that Arabs do not produce science, win major international prizes, or contribute literature.
The Health Secretary also said that in the 13th century, Muslim princes kept bigger libraries than all of Europe combined. He blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for ending that tradition. “They’ve created stagnant societies that do two things: hatred and war, and victimization,” he said.
Arab winners exist in every category Kennedy named. Since 1978, Ahmed Zewail, Moungi Bawendi and Omar M. Yaghi have won Nobel Prizes in science. Zewail and Yaghi also won the Wolf Prize. The Nobel Peace Prize has gone to Anwar Sadat, Yasser Arafat, Mohamed El Baradei, Tawakkol Karman and the Tunisian National Dialogue Quartet. Naguib Mahfouz and Abdulrazak Gurnah have won in literature.
CAIR, the country’s largest Muslim civil rights and advocacy group, answered in an emailed statement. It said Kennedy used “fabricated, white supremacist talking points” to dehumanize half a billion people, including millions of Muslim and Christian Arab Americans. “Anyone who holds such blatant contempt for an entire ethnicity has no business leading a federal agency meant to serve all Americans,” the group said.
Criticism also came from beyond Muslim advocacy circles. Brad Woodhouse, president of the left-leaning nonprofit Protect Our Care, said in his own emailed statement: “Fear and racism are the crutch of pathetic political hacks with absolutely nothing to offer or progress to point to (via HuffPost).”
