Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: ‘Criticizing Islamism Is Neither Islamophobic Nor Racist’

Leftist mainstream media outlets piled on this week to express outrage at my observation, during a speech in Grand Rapids for Mike Rogers, about the troubling dearth of scientific output from the world’s 22 Arab nations over the past five decades. These reporters omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic. However, my speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam but of Islamism (also known as “Islamofascism” or “Political Islam”), a toxic ideology conceived and promoted by the terrorist group, the Muslim Brotherhood. Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist. Islamism is a violent corruption of mainstream Islam that summons adherents back to the seventh-century ideal of bloody jihad, the homicidal and suicidal religious zealotry that propelled a motley cadre of desert nomads to conquer half the world. Sheikh Ahmed El-Tayeb, the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar — the Muslim equivalent of the Vatican and the highest authority in Sunni Islamic thought — has rejected Islamism as “false Islam” and a “perversion of the Islamic religion.” Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity. It is explicitly contemptuous of democracy, constitutional government, capitalism, minority rights, gay rights, women’s rights, free speech, and virtually all personal freedoms. Its central aspiration is for a global caliphate ruled by a single theocratic despot with absolute power to impose sharia law that dictates every aspect of human conduct.The Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy to modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning. For five centuries, Arabic was the world’s most learned and literary tongue and the lingua franca of science and scholarship. Most mosques had libraries (Córdoba hosted 600). Muslim princes in the 10th century often had more books in their personal collections than existed in all of Europe. Baghdad had 100 bookstores in AD 891. England would have to wait another 420 years until 1309 to see paper for the first time. Islam’s second Golden Age during the Ottoman Empire, between 1299 and 1922, birthed a cosmopolitan and pluralistic civilization centered in Constantinople that yielded additional bonanzas in poetry, music, art, and a tsunami of scientific innovation from coffee to water pumps, steam engines, gears, surgical scalpels and clamps, the first smallpox vaccine, and the cannons that allowed the Ottomans to dominate Europe to the gates of Vienna. In 1928, six years after the Ottoman Empire collapsed, the Muslim Brotherhood began to spread its dark strain of violent fundamentalism from Egypt to Palestine and across the Muslim world. Islamism’s contagious proliferation ended the dialogue between Islam and the intellectual classes and demoted the role of reason in Islamic life. The anti-intellectualism of Islamism — the rejection of evidence and the scientific method, the hostility toward objectivity, the suppression of contrary information, the deification of dogma, the embrace of pseudoscience, the contempt for reason as the path for discerning objective truth, and Islamism’s association of science with immorality—has helped close off the Islamic mind. Korea issued 260,000 patents in 2024, while nine Arab countries, including Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE, issued fewer than 10,000 in total, with 8,000 of these coming from a single nation — Saudi Arabia — which has made herculean efforts in recent years to de-Islamize its society. Japan, which represents about 1.5% of the world’s population and is practically devoid of natural resources, granted 306,855 patents in 2024 alone. There are 127 million Japanese, compared to 500 million Arabs. Muslims represent 26 percent of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40 percent of natural gas resources. And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5 percent of the world’s scientific literature. An analysis of Arab science in 2002 in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. Contrast the Arabs’ record of intellectual achievement in modern times with that of their closest cousins, the Jews, nearly all of whom live in democratic societies with laws that separate religion and politics. Jews, who number 15.8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.2 percent of the world population. As of 2025, no Muslim has ever received the Nobel Prize in medicine or economics, and only four Muslim scientists — all living in Western democracies — have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry or physics. In contrast, some 200 Jews have received Nobel Prizes in science. About 26 percent of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28 percent in medicine, 40 percent in economics, and 39 percent in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22 percent of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews. And genocide of the Jews is, for Islamism, more than a theoretical aspiration. In 1948, the world’s 22 Arab nations were host to 750,000 Jews living in communities that predated Muhammad by 1,000 years. Today, there are virtually no Jews in those nations: Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan, Jordan, Gaza, or the PA-governed areas of the West Bank; in Nazi terminology, they are Judenrein: Jew-free. There are fewer than 1,000 Jews in Tunisia, down from 105,000. In 1948, Christian populations represented 20 percent of those nations; today they represent 4 percent. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast.Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared hatred of Jews. The Nazis became the principal funder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, and the Muslim Brotherhood operated propaganda, espionage, and sabotage operations for the Nazis during World War II. Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. The vast influx of money from Iran and the Gulf States starting in the 1990s turned this operation into an amplifier of unmatched power that makes Goebbels look like a piker. A global propaganda barrage by this outfit has distracted Hamas’s Western dupes from Islamism’s authentic genocides by persuading them that Israel committed a genocide in Gaza, even though, according to the CIA Factbook, Gaza’s population has actually increased since October 7.Islamism is genocidal against Christians and Jews, but among its most pitiful victims are the Arab societies that suffer the misfortune of living under its rule. Despite all their petroleum wealth, Muslim countries have slipped behind Asia and Latin America in virtually every metric of political freedom, technological progress, and social well-being. Islamism’s merger of politics and religion has robbed Islam of its intellectual vigor and doomed most Muslim populations to living in stifling tyrannies with little freedom to elucidate their thoughts and speech or fulfill their creative potential. Those countries are predictably stagnant, unable to evolve in the modern world. The dark shadow of fundamentalism over scholarship and progress has proven toxic to the Muslims’ transition to modernity. The very civilization that practiced tolerance and celebrated pluralism and dialogue, filled a thousand libraries with its books, gave the world observatories and universities, and stunning innovations in science, has become closed, aggrieved, and violent, and averse to reason, curiosity, freedom of inquiry, and scholarship. All 22 Arab nations in the Mideast and North Africa are autocratic dictatorships. Almost all are apartheid states that legally restrict the rights of minorities. Gays in many of the nations are put to death. Under sharia law, women have little more rights than cattle. They live stunted lives behind veiled faces, enduring systematic servitude, legalized domestic violence, child marriage, chattel slavery, and public stoning for adultery, which is legal for their husbands. If you want to understand the Muslim Brotherhood’s vision for society, look no further than Gaza. Hamas, which rules Gaza, is the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Palestinians have received over 4 times per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan. Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one. Under Hamas’s iron fist, Gaza remains a stunted, stagnant, and impoverished society under tyrannical oppression.Hamas governs through force, including brutal crackdowns on discourse, public executions of dissenters and collaborators, tight controls on humanitarian aid distribution, and onerous taxes on almost every activity. No elections have occurred since Hamas took over in 2007. Instead of building a nation, Hamas has transformed Gaza into a death cult wallowing in victimhood, nursing aggrievements, addicted to violence, resentments, and yearning for a seventh-century miasma. Hamas nurses Palestinian infants from birth on genocidal hatred and indoctrinates children in the savagery and unspeakable barbarism that the world witnessed on October 7. Contrast Gaza’s failures with the successes of its closest neighbor, Israel, a tiny sliver of swamp and desert 1/600th the size of its Arab neighbors, that blossomed into an agricultural juggernaut and a global economic and technological superpower. Jews took one of the few places in the Mideast with no oil, gas, or other resources, and despite being surrounded by enemies, they nevertheless turned the barren landscape into a vibrant, pluralistic democracy where Jews and Arabs vote as they please; worship according to their convictions; serve beside each other in the judiciary, the army, and political leadership; and enjoy equal rights. And Israel is merely a nugget among the bounties bestowed by Jews on Western civilization. There is no ethnic or religious group that has contributed more than Jews to the welfare of humanity or to the advancement of liberal democracy. Jewish traditions of ethics and thinking have shaped Western civilization and global progress through foundational moral concepts, including our monotheistic Christian belief system with its roots in Judaism, milestone scientific breakthroughs, medical innovation, and innumerable cultural achievements in art, literature, education, health, and entertainment. Relative to their proportion of the population, the astonishing contributions by Jews have been breathtaking.Twenty percent of philanthropic giving in the United States comes from Jews. Jews compose 25 percent of America’s most generous givers. They are overrepresented on lists of secular organizations that benefit human rights, social security, higher education, personal freedom, and constitutional rights. They represent 14 percent of doctors and 29 percent of psychiatrists. Their contributions to America’s global economic leadership include Salomon Brothers, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Blackstone, Wells Fargo, and Vanguard. In a rational universe, wouldn’t non-Jews be expected to celebrate these contributions with gratitude? The answer, of course, is a sophisticated mass propaganda campaign that ignores evidence and inverts reality to make Israel a global villain.__________This essay is excerpted from a response to media criticism of remarks by the author on scientific output in Arab nations, posted October 30 on x.com.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: ‘Criticizing Islamism Is Neither Islamophobic Nor Racist’

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: ‘Criticizing Islamism Is Neither Islamophobic Nor Racist’

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