Message: Coordinated! [Insert Jubilant Handshakes And Backslaps Here]

So as new taxes make a pack of cigarettes cost up to $12, think long and hard about what terrorist organization you’re funding by buying bootleg smokes:

Nearly two dozen Arab cigarette smugglers have been smoked out for buying and then reselling contraband butts to New York bodegas and other shops.

Lured by fake ads in Arabic-language newspapers, the smugglers bought $6 million in contraband smokes from New York tax and federal undercover agents.

And a top elected official now warns that the untaxed cigarettes could be funding terror overseas.

All the profits of the smugglers — whose sales to hundreds of area stores exceeds the business of most legitimate wholesalers — “was shipped overseas to the Middle East,” said Deputy Commissioner William Comiskey of the state Taxation and Finance Office.

“We know that the money wasn’t kept here,” said Comiskey, whose agents conducted the elaborate sting, noting that “it’s a possibility” that the smugglers’ multimillion-dollar operations, which also include sales of guns and counterfeit tax stamps, could be at least partly funding terrorism.

. . .

Noting that the suspected smugglers ducked paying $10 million in New York taxes, [Rep. Peter King (R-LI)] added, “If this money is going overseas, and this money is going to Hezbollah and Hamas . . . we’re talking about life and death, we’re talking about a very serious terror issue.”

The sting led to the arrests of 21 out of 27 men named in money-laundering, trafficking and conspiracy indictments unsealed this week. Most of them are originally from Yemen and Jordan.

The case, which is being prosecuted by federal authorities in Virginia, was set in motion in early 2007 by New York state Tax and Finance agents, who set up a warehouse in King George County, Va., and stocked it with cases of untaxed cigarettes.

The warehouse was extensively wired for audio and video surveillance.

The agents then took out an ad in an Arabic-language newspaper in New Jersey, offering “Tobacco for less . . . special prices for the Arab and African community,” and asking those interested to call a phone with a Virginia area code.