Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remarks at a Republican campaign rally in Grand Rapids have caused a media firestorm, in large part because his Democrat background gives extra sting to his recent criticisms of Islamic culture. In liberal and independent western circles, this is simply not done.
On Monday evening, U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. spoke at a Republican get-out-the-vote (GOTV) rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where an existential political battle is taking place between GOP candidate Mike Rogers and Muslim Democrat pro-immigration candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
RFK noted that Islamic (or Arab) cultures do not produce much of value for humanity as a whole because of the rise of fundamentalist extremism. He argued:
“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.”
El-Sayed has come under fire in recent weeks after it was widely reported that in 2012 (as a medical student at Columbia University) he was one of 46 signatories on an Arabic-language statement published on the Egyptian news site Al-Ahram Gate. The letter showed support for the Muslim Brotherhood and the Mohamed Morsi regime (a senior figure in the Muslim Brotherhood).
It explicitly called on Morsi to “purge the media and the police as quickly as possible" and criticized US and European opposition. &nbs
