What RFK, Jr. Said About The Red-Green Alliance In One Crucial Senate Race

It is refreshing to hear a national politician speak about Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood with real historical knowledge, without the usual panic over being labeled a bigot or Islamophobe. In an age when most public figures treat the subject as radioactive, U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., walked into a Grand Rapids rally last week and addressed it head-on.

Speaking at a Kent County GOP event in support of Senate candidate Mike Rogers, Kennedy took up the Muslim Brotherhood after Rogers raised it in the race against Democrat Abdul El-Sayed. He described the Brotherhood as a death cult that preaches victimization, murder, and genocide, and he argued that its ideology has left societies under its influence atrophied and stagnant. He expressed genuine dismay that Christian communities, once substantial in the historic heartland of Islam — Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon — have been reduced to tiny remnants. And he pointed to the conspicuous absence of major scientific and literary output from the Arab world today despite its 500 million people, contrasting that barrenness with the achievements of a much smaller Israel.

Kennedy has clearly studied the history. He correctly identified the Brotherhood’s role in promoting grievance-driven, violent politics and the sharp decline in innovation after the so-called Golden Age of Islam. Those observations land with force because they match observable reality: societies shaped by Brotherhood-style Islamism tend to produce stagnation, not patents or literature, and the demographic erasure of Christians and Jews.

Yet he missed the mark on two central points, and the misses matter.

First, the Golden Age itself. Kennedy portrayed nearly a thousand years of Islamic rule as an era of tolerance, pluralism, cosmopolitanism, and original contributions to art, literature, science, engineering, medicine, and navigation — produced, in his telling, by “the Muslim religion.” The historical record is more complicated and less flattering to that religious worldview. The early Arab-Muslim conquerors were desert warriors whose primary engine was expansion, plunder, and extracting resources from richer lands. When they overran the Byzantine and Persian territories, they found sophisticated urban civilizations already in place. The minority Muslim rulers relied heavily on the skills of the conquered: Christian and Jewish scholars who translated Greek philosophy and science into Arabic, Syriac-speaking physicians, and Persian Zoroastrian administrators who knew how to run complex states. Algebra, medicine, optics, and the preservation of classical texts did not spring from Bedouin tents; they were advanced by people whose intellectual traditions predated the Muslim conquests.

Conversions to Islam often followed incentives rather than pure theological conviction. Non-Muslims paid higher taxes and faced legal disabilities; joining the ruling faith opened pathways into the elite. The fruits of that period, therefore, cannot be credited to Islam as a religious system. They were the product of a multi-ethnic empire that temporarily leveraged the civilizational capital of the peoples it had subordinated. When stricter Islamic orthodoxy later constricted that capital, the productive energy faded. Kennedy’s admiration for the so-called Golden Age as an Islamic achievement overlooks this dependence and risks romanticizing the very religious framework that later proved hostile to the pluralism he praised.

Second, Kennedy treated the Muslim Brotherhood as a dangerous deviation from traditional Islam. That framing is understandable in Western political speech, but it is historically and theologically inaccurate.

The Brotherhood’s core claim is that it is returning to the sources. In its own literature, Islam is not a private faith confined to personal worship; it is a comprehensive system that governs state, society, family, and law. “Islam is worship and political leadership, the Quran and the sword” is a distillation of the foundational texts and the example of Muhammad, who led and commissioned dozens of military campaigns. For the Brotherhood, imitating that model is not extremism; it is fidelity. Lands outside Islamic governance are viewed as existing in a state of religious ignorance that must eventually be brought under the light of Islamic law. The pursuit of political dominance is therefore not an optional add-on but the consistent outworking of the religion as written and practiced in its formative centuries.

Moreover, the modern term “Islamism” is largely a Western invention designed to create a polite distinction between cultural Muslims and those who seek to literally apply the faith’s political and legal commands. Islamism is simply the literal and comprehensive reading of the texts that millions of believers regard as sacred and prescriptive.

Kennedy is right that the disappearance of Christian communities from their ancient Middle Eastern homelands is a catastrophe. He is right that the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology is toxic to free societies. Greater clarity is needed in recognizing that these outcomes flow less from a modern perversion than from the logical application of foundational “sacred” claims about conquest, governance, and imitating a founder of religion by subordinating non-believers.

Michigan voters now face a choice in a closely watched Senate race that has brought these issues into the open. The red-green alliance Kennedy warned about — the tactical partnership between radical Left politics and Muslim groups — is not a conspiracy theory; it is a documented pattern that has already reshaped parts of Europe. The alarm is real, but so is the opportunity to learn from the past rather than repeat it.

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A. S. Ibrahim holds two PhDs in Islamic Studies. He is the author of “Sharia Versus the U.S. Constitution: Why Americans Must Choose Freedom” and “Islam and the West.” He has also authored “Muhammad’s Military Expeditions” (Oxford, 2024), “A Concise Guide to the Life of Muhammad” (Baker Academic, 2022), “Conversion to Islam” (Oxford, 2021), “Basics of Arabic” (Zondervan, 2021), “A Concise Guide to the Quran” (Baker Academic, 2020), and “The Stated Motivations for the Early Islamic Expansion” (Peter Lang, 2018), among others. Follow him on X: @al2ostaz

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