Robert F. Kennedy

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Provides Antisemitism and Bigotry With Yet Another Misbegotten Megaphone

“[some] individual Jews are all right, Harvey, but as a race they stink. They spoil everything they touch.” – Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.

“Covid-19 is targeted to attack Caucasians and Black people. The people who are most immune are Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese.” – Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Possibly it’s something in the genes. Some hereditary hiccup of hate that lodges itself in the marrow where it festers until it becomes public and repulsive. So it was that on June 13, 1938, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr., U.S. ambassador to the UK, confided to his opposite number, the German ambassador to the UK, that he understood fully that nation’s wish to get rid of the Jews, but that they needed to damp down the “clamor” with which they did it.

Just over 85 years later, Mr. Kennedy’s grandson—and recent declarant for the Democratic presidential nomination—Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., conjectured that the coronavirus could have been a biological weapon “deliberately targeted” to spare Ashkenazi Jews and Chinese people, with its main targets White and Black people. Kennedy’s grimy remarks, captured on video at a dinner party at Time Square’s Tony’s Di Napoli restaurant, were immediately denounced by Anti-Defamation League (ADL) spokesman Jake Hyman, who said, “The claim that covid-19 was a bioweapon created by the Chinese or Jews to attack Caucasians and Black people is deeply offensive and feeds into Sinophobic and antisemitic conspiracy theories.”

Jane Shim, the director of the Stop Asian Hate Project, an initiative of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, also weighed in, describing Kennedy’s remarks as “irresponsible, hateful comments,” comparing them to the “dangerous rhetoric” of President Donald Trump, who has repeatedly referred to covid-19 as “the China virus” and previously called it the “kung flu.”

“Antisemitism and anti-Chinese, anti-Asian sentiment are as old as the country itself. Even today, it’s an easy way to score points with the same nativist ideologues who manufacture conspiracy theories like the one [Kennedy] is now promoting,” Shim said. “While RFK spitballs his baseless claims, leaning into them when beneficial and distancing himself when harmful to his campaign, Asian Americans will be harmed.”

Kennedy also opined, “We don’t know that it was deliberately targeted [like] that or not, but there are papers out there that show the racial and ethnic differential,” and suggested that multiple countries, including the United States and China, are developing ethnic bioweapons to “target people by race.” He then quickly walked back his comments saying they were off the record (although members of the media had been invited and were present) and that he never said them, (although he’s right there on the video, saying them).

The dinner party, which featured references to popular conspiracy theories, was a raucous affair,featuring a screaming match too offensive for inclusion in a family publication involving two opposing sides to the reality of climate change.

RFK Jr. is no stranger to antisemitic tropes, having previously invoked the Holocaust in connection with Covid vaccines. “Even in Hitler’s Germany, you could cross the Alps to Switzerland. You could hide in an attic like Anne Frank did,” he said at an anti-vaccine rally at the Lincoln Memorial last year—a remark so execrable, it prompted rebukes from Jewish groups, friends and even his wife—that he was forced to issue an apology for it.

A recent poll found that Kennedy and his calumnies have a real chance in this toxic political climate. Twenty percent of Democratic voters support him as a presidential candidate with an additional 44 percent saying they would consider voting for him. Of that second group, 1 in 5 said the Kennedy name and family ties were the main reasons for their consideration.

Possibly the latter group—those for whom the Kennedy name bears a mystic resonance—would be well advised to harken to the words of Kennedy’s father, the late Robert F. Kennedy: “What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant;” and, “What we need in the United States is not division; what we need in the United States is not hatred; what we need in the United States is . . .love and wisdom, and compassion toward one another.”