Robert F Kennedy Jr, the US health secretary, faced backlash on Wednesday for a “wildly racist tirade” during a campaign stop in Michigan in which he falsely asserted that Arabs never won leading awards in science or literature

Kennedy was speaking at the Monday night event in Grand Rapids in support of Mike Rogers, the Republican US Senate candidate trailing his Democratic midterms opponent Abdul El-Sayed, who is Muslim, in polling

“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,” Kennedy said

A factcheck published on Tuesday by the Associated Press showed that Arabs have won, or been shortlisted, for all those awards in recent years[…]
Kennedy’s comments came as part of an attack on the Muslim Brotherhood, a global Islamic group with branches that have been designated terrorist organizations by the US government

The rise of the group had “created stagnant societies”, Kennedy said, ending what he called “a golden age [in which] Islamic lands were the center, the foundation for art and literature and science and engineering, and they were highly tolerant and pluralistic and cosmopolitan”

Other Trump administration officials have tried to paint El-Sayed as a supporter of Islamic radicalism, including the president himself, who at a rally in Port Huron, Michigan, on Sunday called the Democrat “a jihadist” who was “on the side of the terrorists”