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A day after US president Donald Trump was accused of “dangerous racism” for comments about Michigan candidate Abdul El-Sayed, health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr has been called out for “false and racist” claims about Arabs while in the state on Monday.
Speaking at an event to drum up support for Republican candidate – and El-Sayed’s rival – Mike Rogers, RFK Jr claimed the world’s “five million Arabs” don’t “produce science”.
He said: “They don’t win the Nobel Prize, they don’t win the Fields Prize, they don’t win the Wolf Prize, and they don’t produce literature.”
Thankfully, people were quick to point out a number of examples of Arabs doing just that, with journalist Mehdi Hasan writing: “One of the men who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last year was a Palestinian-American, Omar Yaghi”:
Zeteo media columnist Justin Baragona noted: “Last year's winner of the National Book Award was Lebanese writer and painter Rabih Alameddine. The winner in non-fiction? Egyptian-American journalist Omar El Akkad”:
Professor Peter Hotez, of the Baylor College of Medicine, commented: “My late colleague and brilliant co U.S. Science Envoy with me in the Obama Admin the @Caltech Nobel Laureate in Chemistry Ahmed Zewail would disagree”:
Others, meanwhile, simply expressed disbelief, with The Bulwark’s Tim Miller asking: “What in the f*** is this?”:
And The Tennessee Holler said: “This is both false and racist”:
We also can’t help but bring up the fact that while RFK Jr inaccurately claimed Arabs haven’t won the Nobel Prize, one person we definitely know hasn’t achieved such an accolade is Donald Trump, who is yet to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, and hasn’t reacted badly to that fact at all…
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