RFK Jr. rebuked for derogatory claim about ‘Arabs in the world’

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is facing backlash for comments he made about Arabs while at a campaign stop in Michigan.

“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,” Kennedy said.

The secretary is wrong — Arabs have won those prizes and produced scientific breakthroughs.

Dr. Peter Hotez, dean of Baylor University’s National School of Tropical Medicine, noted his colleague Ahmed Zewail, an Egyptian American chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1999, would disagree with Kennedy’s remarks.

“God rest his soul he didn’t have to endure this,” Hotez wrote on the social platform X.

Michael Atiyah, who was born in England to a Lebanese father and Scottish mother, won the Fields Medal, the most prestigious prize in mathematics, in 1966.

Zewail won the Wolf Prize for Chemistry in 1993, six years before winning the Nobel.

Al Jazeera compiled a lengthy list of major Arab contributions to math, science and the........

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