Get this one. Every year they have Carnival here in Spain, and the biggest public celebration is held in Cadiz. Part of the celebration is a contest of satirical songs, called chirigotas. Chirigotas are supposed to be brutally sarcastic and often offensive. So far so good.

But the song that won this year's chirigota contest referred to Muslims as "Moros," which is an ethnic slur in Spain, called them "cabrones," literally male goats, but which would translate to "bastards" or "sons of bitches" in English, and called Turks "animals." Then, to top it all off, the song said that "Hitler did a bad job," implying of course that Adolf should have exterminated the Moros and the Turks.

Good God. Satire is one thing and a call for genocide is another.

1) I believe in freedom of speech. 2) I believe individuals have the right to express hateful ideas. 3) That doesn't mean I necessarily approve of either the idea or the person expressing it.

4) There is a place for censorship. The government must not censor anyone, but private organizations can carry out all the censorship they want. That's why Mick Jagger can't sing "You'd make a dead man come" at the Super Bowl, because the people who run the Super Bowl are a private organization, and they can order you not to say certain things if YOU are being paid to provide halftime entertainment at THEIR big football game. If you don't like it, don't take the job.

Same for this disgustingly offensive chirigota. Whoever is in charge of judging the entries at the chirigota contest should have had enough good taste and common decency to say, "Look, satirizing Islam is one thing, but calling for the extermination of Muslims is completely different. You wanna sing your song in the middle of the street, we can't stop you, but you can't use our celebration to call people "bastards" and "animals" and to invoke the name of Hitler. The song is disqualified from the contest."

Looks like the Muslim community has reacted correctly; they're suing the carnival committee and everybody else they can think of. Great, that's the way we do things under the rule of law. You've got a problem, you take it to court. I don't know whether they're going to win or not, but more power to them for having reacted legally and not violently. Let's see if this begins a pattern.