Like much of Western Europe, the home of the European Union, Brussels, Belgium, has a large, growing, and restive Muslim migrant population. And so when the Christmas season rolled around this year, Brussels’ far-left, multiculturally minded leaders were in a quandary. Every year, the city sets up a Nativity scene, but in recent years, the problem of what to do about Muslims in the city who believe that representation of the human form is a serious sin becomes more vexing.
This year, Brussels top dogs decided on what seemed to be an ingenious solution to the problem: they’d set up a Nativity scene as usual, but this time, the figures would have no faces, thus allowing them to skirt the Islamic prohibition on a technicality. Their attempt to please the native Christians as well as the new Muslim arrivals fell flat, however: Belgian Christians hated the faceless display, and faces or no, Muslims destroyed it.
It might have worked. Have you ever walked through a museum and wondered why so many ancient statues have the noses broken off, and paintings have the eyes scratched out? Of course, some of the damage took place unintentionally with the passage of time, but some of it also occurred because to deface, literally, the face of the image was sufficient in Islamic law to render it no longer a representation of the human body, and thus no longer a temptation to idolatry.
This is what has happened with the Sphinx’s nose, which was destroyed not by Napoleon’s troops in target practice (as goes the common story), but by the Muslim precursors of the Islamic State. As The History of Jihad explains, contrary to many legends surrounding the monument’s missing nose — with harm from Napoleon’s cannon being among the most popular myths — the Sufi Muslim Muhammad Sa’im al-Dahr actually destroyed the nose in the 14th century, in order to prevent Egyptian peasants from worshiping the Sphinx.
Likewise, in Balkan Ghosts: A Journey Through History, historian and journalist Robert D. Kaplan repeats uncritically what he likely heard from local Muslims: that the icons in the local churches he visited had their eyes scraped off because the superstitious local Christians had taken them to mix in health potions. It is, however, absolutely inconceivable that Orthodox Christian believers, even the most ignorant and superstitious, would desecrate their own sacred icons in this way. What really happened is that the icons had no eyes because Muslim invaders scraped them off, so as to destroy the image as a representation of the human form.
In Brussels, in any case, the backlash was immediate. The European Conservative reported on Nov. 28 that the faceless Nativity scene “strips the nativity of its spiritual meaning and turns it into a political statement.” That was clearly the idea: no eyes, no nose, no problem. Yet a Belgian columnist wrote: “I grew up with warm, familiar nativity scenes and all the Christian traditions that shaped this country. What’s happening now is absurd: a small, self-appointed progressive elite is dismantling our own culture in the name of a hollow idea of ‘inclusion.’”
In faceless nativity scene in Brussels, Jesus Christ is no longer there because he was beheaded and then his head was stolen. They hate us. pic.twitter.com/nnMK03F0VW
— RadioGenoa (@RadioGenoa) December 2, 2025
Even worse, those who were being included immediately demonstrated that they didn’t appreciate the favor. Just a few days after the faceless Nativity scene went up, the faceless baby Jesus was beheaded, and his head was stolen. “Free Palestine” was also scrawled on the tent in which the Nativity scene was located.
The perpetrators here could have been leftists, but this happened as a pro-Hamas demonstration took place in the city, with Muslim migrants to Belgium as the dominant group. Jihadis also have a taste for beheading, as per the Qur’an (see 8:12 and 47:4).
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Either way, enemies of Judeo-Christian Western civilization were certainly behind it. Putting up a faceless Nativity scene to avoid offending Muslims with depictions of the human form didn’t blunt the wrath of the haters of European civilization. Brussels authorities were trying to appease the unappeasable, and establish some ground for peaceful coexistence based on compromise from both sides. Yet leftists and their jihadi allies are not interested in compromise or coexistence. They want dominance, and they want the destruction of Judeo-Christian Western civilization.
There is no meeting them halfway on this. Either we stand for our own traditions, beliefs, and practices, or we surrender them. Offering to surrender them partially, as Brussels leaders did, is only a prelude to total capitulation, which is clearly what those who destroyed Brussels’ faceless Nativity scene are demanding.
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