RFK Jr. faces widespread rebuke over his anti-Arab remarks

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. faced widespread rebuke from civil rights groups, health care advocates and Democrats on Tuesday over anti-Arab comments that the Council on American-Islamic Relations cast as “a textbook display of unvarnished racism and bigotry.”

In his remarks Monday at a campaign event in Michigan where Republican Mike Rogers is running for the U.S. Senate against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, Kennedy falsely claimed that Arabs had not won major international awards and “don’t produce” science and literature.

“There’s 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet 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,” he said.

El-Sayed responds to Trump's attack on his name and faith

Arabs have won all those prizes. Peter Hotez, who is a professor at the Baylor College of Medicine and specializes in vaccine development and tropical medicine, said his late colleague, Nobel Prize winner Ahmed Zewail, who was Arab and died in 2016, “would disagree” with Kennedy’s comments.

The Department of Health and Human Services did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

U.S. rights advocates have raised concerns over escalating rhetoric against…

Original source: https://www.nbcnews.com/business