U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is refusing to retract his controversial remarks about Arabs, which sparked an uproar across the United States last week. Instead of apologizing, he has published a lengthy manifesto praising Israel and the Jewish people while launching a sweeping attack on the Muslim Brotherhood and Arab countries.
In an unusually long post on X on Friday, spanning approximately 3,700 words, Kennedy accused Iran and Gulf states of financing an anti-Israel propaganda machine whose power he compared to that of Nazi Germany. He also claimed that Jews have contributed more to humanity than any other ethnic or religious group.
"My speech was not a critique of Arabs or Islam, but of Islamism," Kennedy wrote at the beginning of his response, describing the ideology as a dangerous distortion of Islam promoted by the Muslim Brotherhood. He accused major news organizations of omitting critical context from their coverage, suggesting they had done so to lend credibility to allegations that his remarks were racist and Islamophobic. "Criticizing Islamism is neither Islamophobic nor racist," he added.
Much of Kennedy's response focused on Israel and the war in Gaza. He argued that the Muslim Brotherhood had spent decades developing a global propaganda network designed to incite hatred against Jews and portray Israel as an enemy of humanity. He further claimed that the Nazis were the movement's principal financiers during the 1930s and that "Joseph Goebbels and an army of Nazi and ex-Nazi propagandists built the Muslim Brotherhood’s powerful propaganda machine in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s."
"The massive 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," Kennedy wrote. He claimed the resulting global propaganda campaign had convinced Western supporters of Hamas that Israel had committed genocide in Gaza, while diverting attention from what he described as atrocities committed by Islamist movements. These were Kennedy's allegations, not independently established findings about the organizations or governments he named.
Kennedy also rejected accusations of genocide in Gaza by citing what he said were CIA figures showing that the territory's population had increased since the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel. However, previous fact-checks have found that the widely circulated CIA World Factbook population-growth figures were based on projections prepared before the war, rather than measurements of population changes during the conflict.
Four times the Marshall Plan
Kennedy urged readers to compare the Gaza Strip with Israel. "Palestinians have received over 4X per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan," he claimed, referring to the U.S.-funded program that helped rebuild Europe after World War II. "Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one."
According to Kennedy, Hamas diverted international assistance toward weapons, payments to its leaders and an extensive network of underground tunnels and bunkers intended for its fighters rather than civilians. He described Gaza as a society suffering under authoritarian rule, alleging that Hamas had squandered opportunities for economic and political development.
By contrast, Kennedy portrayed Israel in glowing terms. He described it as "a tiny sliver of swamp and desert 1/600th the size of its Arab neighbors" that had become "an agricultural juggernaut and a global economic and technological superpower."
According to Kennedy, the Jewish people transformed an arid landscape into a thriving, pluralistic democracy where Jews and Arabs can vote, practice their religions and participate in public institutions. He held Israel up as an example of economic development, technological innovation and democratic government in the Middle East.
"Women and gays in Israel have all the rights of men, and Israel’s biggest annual celebration is the Pride parade in Tel Aviv," Kennedy wrote, offering a sweeping characterization of Israeli civil rights and public life. He went on to describe Israel as "a robust and heroic outpost for freedom and Western values."
Kennedy's praise extended beyond Israel to the Jewish people as a whole. "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," he declared.
He noted that Jews account for approximately 0.2% of the world's population but have received, by his calculation, about 22% of all Nobel Prizes awarded since 1901. "Relative to their proportion of the population, the astonishing contributions by Jews have been breathtaking," he wrote.
What Jews ‘don't do’
Kennedy, who has been one of the most prominent voices in the American anti-vaccine movement, notably praised Jewish scientists responsible for developing polio vaccines, including Jonas Salk and Albert Sabin. He also listed medical pioneers Paul Ehrlich, Selman Waksman and Ernst Chain among those whose achievements helped transform modern medicine.
His list extended to physicists Albert Einstein and Niels Bohr, as well as Jewish founders and executives associated with major technology companies, including Google, Meta and Oracle. He also credited Jews with playing a foundational role in creating Hollywood and shaping the American entertainment industry.
"In a rational universe, wouldn’t non-Jews be expected to celebrate these contributions with gratitude?" he asked.
Kennedy then presented a lengthy list of acts he asserted Jews do not commit. It included suicide bombings, beheadings, attacks on gay people, forced child marriages, violence against women, hijacking passenger planes and flying them into buildings, as well as bombing buses and crowded restaurants. He also mentioned acid attacks, slave markets and calls for global jihad.
"These are the gifts that Islamism has bestowed on the world, along with closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression, and violence," Kennedy wrote, using the list to draw a broad contrast between Jewish contributions to society and the violence he associated with Islamist extremism.
He then posed the question: "Why does the world hate Jews and embrace Islamists?" His answer was that a sophisticated propaganda campaign had distorted public perceptions of Israel and its adversaries by ignoring evidence and reversing the roles of victim and aggressor.
From the Michigan rally to the deleted post
Kennedy's manifesto followed the controversy surrounding his remarks last Monday at a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he appeared in support of Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers.
"There's 500 million Arabs in the world, and yet they don't produce science," Kennedy said at the event. He also asserted that Arabs do not win Nobel Prizes, Fields Medals or Wolf Prizes and no longer produce significant literature.
The remarks drew condemnation from scientists, physicians and civil rights organizations, which pointed to numerous Arab achievements that directly contradicted his claims. Among those cited were Egyptian American chemist Ahmed Zewail, who won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry; Egyptian author Naguib Mahfouz, who received the 1988 Nobel Prize in Literature; and Jordanian American chemist Omar Yaghi, a recipient of the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Kennedy's sister, Kerry Kennedy, also condemned his statements. "Today, I am deeply ashamed of him," she wrote, recalling earlier remarks in which her brother had warned against politicians exploiting prejudice and xenophobia. She described his latest comments as false, cruel and derogatory.
Rogers is running in Tuesday's November 3 midterm elections against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, an Egyptian American Muslim physician and former public health official. Rogers, President Donald Trump and Kennedy have sought to link El-Sayed to the Muslim Brotherhood, allegations the Democratic candidate has rejected.
Kennedy devoted the final portion of his lengthy post to demanding that El-Sayed explicitly distance himself from the organization and its ideology, even though the candidate has already publicly disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood. Kennedy questioned whether El-Sayed had sufficiently condemned the movement and portrayed the issue as a test of his commitment to American democratic values.
This was also not the first time Kennedy had invoked Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels in attacking what he described as an anti-Israel information campaign. On October 7, the third anniversary of the Hamas attack, he posted on X that a global Muslim Brotherhood propaganda operation funded by Qatar made Goebbels look like an amateur.
That post also dismissed allegations of genocide against Israel, but Kennedy deleted it shortly afterward, when it had already accumulated approximately 336,000 views. Neither he nor his department offered an explanation for its removal.
In his new manifesto, Kennedy returned to the same argument about an alleged global propaganda operation, but with one notable change: Where his deleted post had singled out Qatar, the latest version accused Iran and Gulf states more broadly of providing the money.