The Washington, D.C., Metropolitan Area Transit Authority has decided to reject all issue-oriented advertising through at least the end of the year after an anti-Islam group sought to run an ad in subway stations and on buses featuring a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad.

The illustration, by comic artist Bosch Fawstin, was the winning entry in the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Contest held May 3 in Garland, Texas, where two armed gunmen were killed by police during a foiled attack on the event.

The contest's sponsor, the American Freedom Defense Initiative, was also paying for the ad, which was intended to appear in five subway stations and on 20 buses throughout June at cost of $20,000.

The decision Thursday by Metro's governing board was quick (it was not on the day's agenda) and unanimous. “My view is, you put that ad up on the side of a bus, you turn that bus into a terrorism target,” an anonymous Metro official was quoted as saying. "I think it’s a very bad outcome for everybody. But it’s a risk we don’t want to put our passengers under."

AFI co-founder and president Pamela Gellar labeled the decision as "sharia in America," telling The Washington Post's Michael Cavna that, "These cowards may claim that they are making people safer, but I submit to you the opposite. They are making it far more dangerous for Americans everywhere. Rewarding terror with submission is defeat. Absolute and complete defeat. More demands, more violence will certainly follow. The message is that terror works."

Although Metro declined to run the cartoon, the agency did carry AFDI ads last year that compared Islam to Nazism. When similar ads appeared on San Francisco buses, an anonymous critic covered them up with images of Ms. Marvel and anti-hate slogans. New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority and the Philadelphia transit system both stopped accepting political ads rather than run AFDI's ads, after both agencies were told by the courts they could not ban only the group's ads.

Political ads would've accounted for about $1 million in revenue for remainder of the year, according to DC Metro marketing manager Lynn Bowersox, but some of that will likely be offset by commercial advertisements.