RFK Jr. Slams Media for Misrepresenting His Remarks on Islamism
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. criticizes legacy media for misrepresenting his comments on Islamism and Arab nations.
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Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. accused legacy media outlets of stripping context from his remarks at a Michigan campaign rally, arguing in a lengthy social media post that his criticism of Islamism was being misrepresented as an attack on Arabs and Muslims.
Context Stripped, Mischaracterized
In the roughly 3,700-word post, Kennedy said outlets omitted context from his remarks at a rally for Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers, “presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic.”
“Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist,” Kennedy wrote. “Islamism is intensely anti-American, anti-Western, and hostile to modernity.”
The post named reporters at the Associated Press, Reuters, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and MS NOW. The Times ran its report under the headline “Kennedy Makes Bigoted Remarks About Arabs at Michigan Campaign Event.” The piece quoted Kennedy’s praise of Islam’s historical scientific and cultural achievements and reported his argument that the Muslim Brotherhood had undermined that tradition. It nevertheless characterized his remarks as bigoted and challenged his claim that Arabs no longer produced award-winning work.
Clarifying Islamism vs. Islam
At the rally, Kennedy explicitly rejected equating criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood with hostility toward Muslims. “I want to say this, that talking about the Muslim Brotherhood is not Islamophobia,” he said, as The Daily Wire previously reported. That statement was not included in the Times article.
Kennedy’s post drew a distinction between Islamism as a political ideology and Islam as a religion, pointing to historical Muslim contributions to mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and the arts.
He defined Islamism as “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.”
Historical Context and Criticism
Kennedy argued that Sayyid Qutb, the principal philosopher for the Muslim Brotherhood, sought to expel reason from Islam and turn it into a fundamentalist religion. He blamed Islamism, rather than classical Islam, for what he called the current “staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations,” adding, “[a]s 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.”
The dispute also involved accusations by Kennedy and Rogers about Democrat Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed’s connections to the Muslim Brotherhood.
Kennedy cited an investigation that he said documented “El-Sayed’s two decades of intensive affiliations with the Muslim Brotherhood, and nearly every one of its legacy front groups that the Brotherhood set up in the U.S. to Islamify and destroy our democracy.”
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 — @fatimathefatima @AP, @Kanishka183 @Reuters, @rachel_roubein @washingtonpost, @baylisswagner @nytimes, @stevebenen @MSNOWNews — omitted critical context, presumably to bestow plausibility on their accusations that my statements were racist and Islamophobic.
Source: Daily Wire
