Remember all the chaos that ensued after a Danish newspaper printed a handful of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed? Well, now we have a Spanish equivalent.
Satirical mag El Jueves - a sort of cross between Britain's Private Eye and America's Mad magazine - has found itself in the dock after a court ordered the seizure of all unsold copies of last week's issue.
Why?
Well, the cover featured Crown Prince Felipe and missus engaged in what The Guardian called an ardent session of lovemaking. Under a banner headline that referred to PM Zapatero's one-off €2,500 lump sum handout to parents of newborns (thanks Thetta-pé, virtually a year too late for me to qualify...), the Prince quipped that if he was able to get his wife pregnant (for a third time) it would be the nearest he had come to earning money in his life.
Now, for anyone who has ever browsed
this magazine on the newsstands or read the spin-off book "Tocando los Borbones" (the pun doesn't translate very well, so I'll leave the title in Spanish), the aforementioned vignette would not really seem shocking in the slightest (and most "naughty bits" were kept well out of sight), but Judge Juan del Olmo (that's him on the left) seemed to think so and ordered the confiscation of the remaining copies of the mag.
Satirical mag El Jueves - a sort of cross between Britain's Private Eye and America's Mad magazine - has found itself in the dock after a court ordered the seizure of all unsold copies of last week's issue.
Why?
Well, the cover featured Crown Prince Felipe and missus engaged in what The Guardian called an ardent session of lovemaking. Under a banner headline that referred to PM Zapatero's one-off €2,500 lump sum handout to parents of newborns (thanks Thetta-pé, virtually a year too late for me to qualify...), the Prince quipped that if he was able to get his wife pregnant (for a third time) it would be the nearest he had come to earning money in his life.
Now, for anyone who has ever browsed
this magazine on the newsstands or read the spin-off book "Tocando los Borbones" (the pun doesn't translate very well, so I'll leave the title in Spanish), the aforementioned vignette would not really seem shocking in the slightest (and most "naughty bits" were kept well out of sight), but Judge Juan del Olmo (that's him on the left) seemed to think so and ordered the confiscation of the remaining copies of the mag.
It is curious to think that a moderately witty cartoon on the front of a reknowned satirical magazine could be considered more offensive and embarrassing to the royal family than a national television news report (which I'm sure is still on YouTube somewhere... I'm not linking to it here!) which showed a strong gust of Galician wind blow up Letizia's skirt á la Marilyn Monroe (although HRH was unable to preserve her modesty).I don't recall any legal action there!
A story of international import nonetheless, and here are just a handful of the reports from around the English-speaking press.
