Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told a Michigan crowd that 500 million Arabs have never won a Nobel Prize, a Fields Medal, or a Wolf Prize, and the claim is flatly false.
Quick Take
- Kennedy told a Grand Rapids rally that Arabs “don’t produce science” and never win major prizes.
- Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zewail won the 1999 Nobel in Chemistry, and novelist Naguib Mahfouz won it in Literature in 1988.
- Kennedy blamed the Muslim Brotherhood for what he called centuries of Arab intellectual stagnation.
- Groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations and medical experts called the remarks bigoted and factually wrong.
What Kennedy Actually Said In Michigan
At a campaign stop in Grand Rapids, Kennedy made his case in blunt terms. “There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they 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. They don’t produce literature.”
Arabs 'don't produce science, they don't win the Nobel Prize… They don't produce literature' — RFK Jr
His statement sparked a heated reaction in the comments pic.twitter.com/fic76EzUjs
— RT (@RT_com) October 27, 2026
The remarks came during an event tied to Michigan’s political scene, featuring Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers. Arab-American Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has also been active in that state’s politics, adding a layer of campaign-season tension to Kennedy’s comments about an entire ethnic group.
The Nobel Record Tells A Different Story
Fact-checkers moved fast, and the numbers were not close. Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian-American chemist, won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for pioneering work in femtochemistry. Naguib Mahfouz, an Egyptian novelist, won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the first Arabic-speaking writer ever honored by the prize committee.
The list goes further. Omar M. Yaghi won the Chemistry prize in 2025. Mohamed El Baradei and Tawakkol Karman each won the Peace Prize, and Lebanese-born mathematician Michael Atiyah won the Fields Medal, the top honor in his field. Every one of these names directly contradicts Kennedy’s claim that Arabs never win these awards.
A Historical Argument Aimed At The Muslim Brotherhood
Kennedy did not stop at denying modern achievement. He argued Arabs once led the world in scholarship, saying 13th-century Muslim princes held more books in their libraries than existed across Europe. He then claimed that legacy “has been destroyed by the Muslim Brotherhood,” which he said “created stagnant societies that do one or two things: hatred, war, and victimization.”
That argument blends three separate things: a broad ethnic group, a religion, and one specific political movement founded in Egypt in 1928. Treating Arabs, Muslims, and the Muslim Brotherhood as interchangeable ignores that Arabs include Christians and people of many faiths, and that the Brotherhood itself has never run most Arab nations.
Reaction From Scientists And Civil Rights Groups
Criticism arrived quickly from multiple directions. A former top official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention called Kennedy “unserious and incurious about the world,” while a Middle East studies professor at the University of Oklahoma described the comments as “incredibly disappointing” and “bigoted.”
News outlets across the spectrum, from Al Jazeera to the Boston Globe, labeled the statement false and pointed to the same documented laureates as proof. When a sitting health secretary makes a sweeping claim about a scientific award and gets the basic facts wrong, that is a legitimate story regardless of politics.
What The Real Research Gap Actually Shows
There is a genuine, measurable issue buried under Kennedy’s rhetoric. UNESCO reporting on Arab states has found that research and development spending remains low across much of the region, even as university enrollment has grown sharply in recent years. That reflects funding and institutional choices, not some fixed trait of an entire ethnic group.
A fair conversation about underinvestment in research infrastructure across Arab-majority countries is worth having. Kennedy’s version skipped that nuance entirely, swapped in a false headcount of zero Nobel winners, and then blamed a specific political movement without offering any study to back it up. That is not analysis. It is a talking point dressed up as a fact, and it fell apart the moment reporters checked the record.
Sources:
nbcnews.com, apnews.com, al-monitor.com, soapcentral.com, bostonglobe.com, boston25news.com
