Do Terrorists Burn SUVs or Drive Them?

Jan. 10, 2003 — -- Who's the bigger terrorist, the guy who lights a firebomb under SUVs in an auto dealer's lot, or the guy who drives one home?

Sport utility vehicles, the gas-guzzling titans of the road that have dominated auto sales in recent years, have recently become the target of firebomb attacks in at least two states by a group the FBI refers to as domestic terrorists.

At the same time, in a pair of new television ads, a nonprofit group called the Detroit Project links driving a sport utility vehicle with more money being put in the hands of terrorists. The ad campaign comes on the heels of another anti-SUV campaign mounted by the Evangelical Environmental Network that asked, "What would Jesus drive?"

"This campaign is not designed to demonize SUV drivers," said columnist Arianna Huffington, who came up with the idea for the Detroit Project commercials and announced that the two ads were coming in an essay in October. "We want to encourage customers to connect the dots and make socially responsible consumer choices."

The column referred to remarks by Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham that "reducing our nation's dependence on imported oil is crucial to our national energy security," and cited a CIA report that Iraq uses the money it receives from oil sales — money that, according to U.N. sanctions, is supposed to be used for food and medicine — to finance Saddam Hussein's nuclear, chemical and biological weapons programs.

Huffington said she had received 5,000 e-mails by the next morning from people offering to help pay for the campaign.

The ads, written and directed by Scott Burns, who worked on the Got Milk? campaign, are patterned after the antidrug ads that connect white, middle-class marijuana users with drug-related violence and terrorism.

One of the ads begins with a child's voice saying, "This is George. This is the gas that George bought for his SUV." It proceeds step by step from an image of a man filling up the tank of his SUV with gasoline to images of Islamic terrorists, ending with the child saying, "And these are the terrorists who get money from those countries every time George fills up his SUV."