A bikini-wearing blogger with Tea Party ties has placed ads on city buses aimed at outraging Muslims. "Fatwa on your head? Is your community or family threatening you? Leaving Islam?" read the ads bought by rabble-rouser Pamela Geller and the New York-based Stop the Islamization of America.
They also direct Muslims to a Web site urging them to leave the "falsity of Islam."
Geller, 51, a leader in the fight against the proposed Ground Zero mosque, said she was "thrilled" that the ads were up - and doesn't care if they offend Muslims.
"Will it bother Islamic supremacists? Yes," she said.
Geller said she spent $10,000 - money raised by readers of her Atlas Shrugs blog - for 40 ads appearing on the sides of buses citywide for a month.
"There ought to be ads also for people who want to leave Islam," she said. "Their lives are threatened."
Similar bus ads have run in Miami - over the objections of local Muslims, who called them a "smoke screen for hatred" - and more are planned for Detroit.
An archconservative on the liberal upper West Side, Geller worked at the Daily News on the business side during the 1980s before moving to The New York Observer - a gig that apparently gave her access to City Hall, where she was photographed with Mayor Bloomberg.
Geller made a splash in the right-wing blogosphere four years ago by videotaping a denunciation of Palestinian terrorists - while dressed in a bathing suit and frolicking in the surf off Israel.
A year later, the racy right-winger donned another bikini to send Christmas greetings to the troops in Iraq.
"I want to thank the troops for sacrificing everything so I can be here in my bathing suit opening up my incredibly big mouth and saying exactly what I want," she said.
Geller wears a tight-fitting Superman outfit on her blog, which is replete with attacks on Islam and unfounded claims about President Obama.
Her blog is popular with the political right, and it earned her an invitation to speak at a recent Tea Party convention in Tennessee.
Her bus ads, however, angered Muslims in Astoria, Queens, yesterday.
"I feel angry, so angry, when people want to target my religion," said Ikraine Chemssy, 24.
"I think it's stupid, sorry," said Souad Azzam, 45. "You are free to believe whatever you want. If you are in it by force, you are not a real Muslim."
Asked about the controversial ads, MTA spokesman Aaron Donovan said they "did not violate the MTA's advertising guidelines."
