Rex Nelson

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. 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. Let’s see which reporters take the time to read this post and then correct their stories. 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” and accused it of “barbaric crimes.” 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 founder, Hassan al-Banna, taught that the highest aspiration for a Muslim was martyrdom in the achievement of that goal; the purpose of every Islamic nation is to “perfect the industry of death” until world domination is accomplished. I pointed out in my speech that the Muslim Brotherhood’s antipathy for modernity is a dramatic departure from Islam’s historical affinity for science and learning. During the Muslim Golden Age, spanning the eighth through the fifteenth centuries, Muslim leaders dignified Islam’s wealth and power by promoting a brilliant flowering of innovation and scholarship in science, mathematics, philosophy, art, literature, astronomy, pharmacology, psychology, engineering, architecture, medicine, and navigation that continues to enrich the world today. Arab leaders fostered an intellectual ferment unmatched by any other in human history. A long line of enlightened caliphs assembled—and abundantly rewarded—an unparalleled galaxy of jurists, scientists, physicians, philosophers, musicians, artists, poets, and wits. Muslim rulers elevated the role of reason and tolerance, cultivating a milieu of religious and intellectual freedom—where Jews and Christians also flourished—and encouraged sages of various faiths and ethnicities to collaborate and freely exchange ideas. 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 tenth 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 (1299–1922) 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 Muslim Brotherhood’s principal philosopher, Sayyid Qutb, was contemptuous toward public education in science, math, and philosophy, believing that the only source of truth is the Koran. For Qutb, the purpose of education was not to celebrate life, or to nourish the intellect, but to indoctrinate children in the art of war, the glorification of death, and a blind obedience to an autocratic caliph. Qutb railed against reason, which he considered the seed of apostasy. He sought to silence the humanities and viewed science as a sinister displacement of religion. He derided pluralism, rationalism, innovation, and tolerance. In doing so, he deprived Islam of its modern potential and its own greatest inheritance: the confidence to learn from the world, preserve its wisdom, and surpass it. In his obituary for Muslim culture, The Closing of the Muslim Mind (2010), Robert R. Reilly recognizes that Qutb’s outlook dooms his followers to inertia. A religion that values obedience over initiative, that seeks to obviate independent reason, is a religion of violence. Where there is no framework for rational mediation, all disputes must be settled by force. It didn’t worry Qutb that discouraging education in physics, mathematics, medicine, or engineering would atrophy intellectual and economic development in the Muslim world. Qutb explained that Muslim countries were so far behind the West in the sciences and technology that there was no hope to catch up. Muslims, he preached, should do what they do best—study the Koran and embrace martyrdom as the path for achieving global dominion: “The Muslim community today is neither capable of nor required to present before mankind great genius in material inventions, which would make the world bow its head before its supremacy.” Qutb’s diatribe against Muslims competing in science and technology was nothing less than civilizational malpractice—especially given that he wrote it in 1964. Had Japan, Singapore, or South Korea accepted Qutb’s logic in 1964, they would have opted out of modernity. Instead, they chose to accept the challenge of competition. Their decision to engage has yielded stunning achievements that transformed their nations into economic and technological superpowers and enriched all of humanity. 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. The staggering metrics of intellectual and scholastic enfeeblement in Muslim nations attest to Islamism’s systematic squandering of human capital including the creative potential among the world’s two billion Muslims. 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. According to Hillel Ofek’s 2011 analysis, there were a mere nine scientists, engineers, and technicians per thousand citizens in Islamic nations. The global average was forty-one. Among the 1,800 universities in Muslim nations, only 312 housed scholars who had published articles in journals. Muslims represent 26% of the world’s population, and Muslim countries control half the world’s crude oil resources and 40% of natural gas resources. And yet the 53 Muslim countries combined publish only 5% of the world’s scientific literature. Hillel Ofek points to a 1989 study showing that in a single year, the United States published 10,481 frequently cited scientific papers, but during that same year, Arab countries published just four. A 2002 analysis of Arab science in Nature magazine identified only three scientific areas of excellence from Islamic countries: desalination, falconry, and camel reproduction. According to Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg in 2011, “for forty years I have not seen a single paper by a physicist or astronomer working in a Muslim country that was worth reading.” Contrast the Arabs’ dismal 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. Keep in mind that Jews, who number 15.8 million worldwide, represent a mere 0.2% 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% of Nobel Prizes in math and science, 28% in medicine, 40% in economics, and 39% in chemistry have gone to Jews. Since 1901, some 22% of Nobel Prizes in all categories have gone to Jews. Genocidal hatred against ALL Jews and Christians and other minorities is foundational to Islamism. Only in the West does Jew hatred pretend to require the alibi of Palestine or hide behind anti-Zionism. Muslim Brotherhood cosmology describes the universe as a cosmic, existential war between Islam and Jews that began with Muhammad and which only one side can survive. “Since Islam subdued them [in Medina],” Qutb warned, “they are unforgiving and fight furiously through conspiracies, intrigues, and also through proxies [the United States] who act in the darkness against all what Islam incorporates.” Islamist utopia will only emerge when every Jew is exterminated. Jews in Qutb’s theology are not just political adversaries, but perpetual and metaphysical evil. “The Jews,” he said, “are behind materialism, animal sexuality, the destruction of family, and the desolation of society.” And Jewish genocide, for Islamism, is 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% of those nations; today they represent 4%. These are the real ongoing genocides of the Mideast. Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime bonded with early Islamists over their shared Jew hatred. 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, ’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. 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, 2023. 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. In September 2021, the Taliban made it illegal for girls to attend school after age 12. The Taliban’s Vice and Virtue law forbids women from speaking aloud in public. 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 4X per capita in international aid than Europeans received under the Marshall Plan. (See Clawson 2002.) Europe used its money to rebuild 17 nations. Palestinians couldn’t build themselves even one. Under Hamas’s iron fist, Gaza squandered its share on bombs, weapons, extravagant salaries for its billionaire kingpins, and a billion-dollar bunker and tunnel system built for its warriors—but off-limits to its citizens. Gaza remains a stunted and stagnant, impoverished society under tyrannical oppression, with no free speech or other basic freedoms. 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 of ALL Jews—not just Zionists—and indoctrinates children in the savagery and unspeakable barbarism that the world witnessed on October 7. Hamas shows its contempt for the Palestinian people by deploying them as child soldiers and civilian shields, and placing rocket launchers and ammo dumps in schools and hospitals. Hamas’s greatest strengths are its propaganda operation and its willingness to impose unlimited pain on its own population to achieve its ideological goals. Islamist governments like Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah distract their populations from their misery by blaming the myriad social ills and the predictable government failures on scapegoats: Jews, Zionists, and America. They’ll have us believe that all their derelictions are the result of the evil Zionists, the “Little Satan” Israel, and the “Great Satan,” the U.S. And just as victimhood is paralyzing to personal growth, it deprives Islamist nations of national success by robbing its practitioners of agency. Islamism’s cult of victimhood and its coterminous abolition of self-criticism have stagnated global Islam and locked it in hatred, violence, brooding resentment, and isolationism. Referring to the Arab world, Fouad Ajami described this as “a political tradition of belligerent self-pity.” 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. Women and gays in Israel have all the rights of men, and Israel’s biggest annual celebration is the Pride parade in Tel Aviv. As the only democracy in the Mideast, Israel is a robust and heroic outpost for freedom and Western values. 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. An abbreviated list would include medical advances like the polio vaccine (Jonas Salk, Albert Sabin), chemotherapy and immunology (Paul Ehrlich), streptomycin and the age of antibiotics (Selman Waksman), penicillin (Ernest Chain), pacemakers (Paul Zoll), and blood typing (Karl Landsteiner). In sciences, a short list of Jewish luminaries would include Albert Einstein (theory of relativity), Niels Bohr (quantum mechanics), and Paul Berg (first recombinant DNA molecule). Jewish contributions to business and technology include Google (Sergey Brin), Meta (Mark Zuckerberg), Oracle (Larry Ellison), Salesforce (Marc Benioff), Intel (Andrew Grove), and Dell Technologies (Michael Dell). Jews virtually created the American entertainment industry, including founding six of the eight major Hollywood studios responsible for 75% of the classic Golden Age movies. They also revolutionized laughter. A 1978 TIME magazine survey found that 80% of professional comedians were Jewish. The major figures of twentieth-century Western thought—Jesus Christ, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, and Karl Marx—were all Jewish. Twenty percent of philanthropic giving in the United States comes from Jews. Jews compose twenty-five 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% of doctors and 29% 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? Now, here are some things that Jews don’t do: suicide bombings, rape gangs, beheading people, killing gay people, aspiring to kill all non-Muslims, forcing young girls to wed older men, lynching women for wearing makeup or showing hair, female mutilation, religious dictatorship, Christian genocide, polygamy, rioting and burning down cities, applying the death penalty for leaving Islam, cooking babies in ovens, hijacking airliners (and driving them into buildings), bombing buses and crowded restaurants, disfiguring girls with acid for failing to wear the hijab, operating modern slave markets where hereditary Black slaves are bought and sold by Arabs, advocating global jihad, and committing 90% of the terrorist acts globally. These are the gifts that Islamism has bestowed on the world, along with closed minds, poverty, starvation, ignorance, oppression, and violence. This comparison begs the question, “Why does the world hate Jews and embrace Islamists? The answer, of course, is a sophisticated mass propaganda campaign that ignores evidence and inverts reality to make Israel a global villain. Looking at Islamism’s track record, seven nations with substantial Muslim populations—Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Bahrain, Jordan, Syria, and Russia—have outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood, branding it as a terrorist organization. Kenya and Argentina have also banned the Brotherhood for fear of its impacts on their societies. The Brotherhood today sees its best opportunities for expansion as Western nations that are unequipped to deal with its tactics. In 2004, the FBI discovered the U.S. Brotherhood’s archives in a Virginia basement, including a 1991 “Explanatory Memorandum” characterizing the Brotherhood’s work in America as “a kind of gradual Jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within.” Muslim Brotherhood documents describe this process of gradual infiltration as “gradualism,” “entryism,” or “Da’awa.” In a 1995 speech in Toledo, Ohio, the Brotherhood’s leading cleric, Yusuf al-Waradawi, told his audience: “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America! Not through sword but through Da’awa.” As a board member and outreach chair of a Muslim Brotherhood front group, Abdul El-Sayed ran a high-school recruitment program entitled “How to do effective Da’awa.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s explicit written strategy for taking over Western nations is to broaden its appeal through a “red–green alliance” by adopting Leftist rhetoric and allying itself with liberals, socialists, and communists. This was the strategy first initiated by Yasser Arafat in the 1960s and then implemented by Muslim Brotherhood acolyte Ayatollah Khomeini during his 1979 Iranian Revolution, and later by Muslim Brother Mohammed Morsi during his 2011 color revolution in Egypt. After they gained power, the Leftists, in each case, learned that they were not actually Islamism’s partners, but only its useful idiots. Khomeini hunted down, jailed, and murdered his former Leftist and communist allies. Morsi sidelined his. A 2012 Arabic-language statement bearing Abdul Al-Sayed’s name backed Morsi’s presidency and urged him to “purge” the media and police. Anyone wondering what America’s future looks like if the Muslim Brotherhood gets its way has only to look at France, where Islamist mobs of the red–green alliance, following the Muslim Brotherhood playbook, chant communist phrases, wave Palestinian flags, and vent their destructive hostility toward the West by destroying the iconic monuments of our shared civilizations. Abdul El-Sayed mocks his critics as Islamophobic or anti-Arab racists when they inquire about his continued loyalties to the Muslim Brotherhood. But El-Sayed and his family have long and deep entanglements with the terrorist organization. A 20,000-word investigation by The Project for the Investigation of Terrorism documents 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. That same organization recorded dozens of instances in recent years where Abdul El-Sayed has either directly lied about his relationship or refused to disavow the Muslim Brotherhood. On Oct. 1, an Ohio voter became the latest to ask Al-Sayed to disavow the Brotherhood. Under persistent badgering before national news cameras, Al-Sayed finally caved: “Sure. Yeah, absolutely!” he said unconvincingly. He then spent five minutes attacking the man’s motives. El-Sayed said nothing about the Brotherhood itself, its ideology, or the Muslim Brotherhood front organizations he works with. A disavowal that names nothing and condemns nothing is a disavowal in name only. Why can’t El-Sayed give us a full-throated and detailed condemnation of this terror group, and disavow also its poisonous ideology without ambiguity? Why can’t he acknowledge that the Muslim Brotherhood is a despicable terror organization, and that Islamism and sharia law are anathema to American values? Americans shouldn’t have to worry whether a U.S. Senate candidate has loyalty to an ideology that openly hates our country and has vowed to destroy it.