Wylie Goodman recalls sitting in her Brooklyn home in August when she thought she heard gunfire outside.

Actually, it was someone shooting paintballs at a 27-foot-tall mural she had allowed to be created on the side of the building she owns in Red Hook.

It depicts half of a woman’s face, her head partly covered by a head scarf, her mouth missing.

The mural is part of a campaign in London and New York to post images to protest the jailing of an illustrator, Atena Farghadani, who was sentenced this summer to 12 years in an Iranian prison for depicting politicians there as animals.

But the mural, which was created as a gesture of international solidarity, has become the focus of a divisive debate in the neighborhood, where some have not taken the image to be a plea for free speech, but rather an anti-American effort that disrespects the memory of terror victims.