Most of the children in elementary schools today were born after September 11, 2001, and this presents parents with a dilemma: How do you explain the event to a child who has no first-hand knowledge of it? As the ten-year anniversary approaches, parents worrying about how to handle the subject can breathe a sigh of relief. Skip the complexity and just hand them a new coloring book, “We Shall Never Forget 9/11: The Kids’ Book of Freedom,” that explains all—and, to cite just one example of the tastelessness (as seen above), gives kids the opportunity to color in a member of SEAL Team Six taking aim at a veiled woman and, cowering just behind her, Osama bin Laden himself.

“We Shall Never Forget 9/11” is not, sadly enough, the first coloring book of its kind. FEMA produced the ill-fated “A Scary Thing Happened,” which depicted a variety of disasters and prominently featured images of the World Trade Center on fire. That title was removed from circulation a few years ago after widespread criticism. (When the Daily News went out for a man-on-the-street reaction, one father from Manhattan summed things up by saying, “I feel like I should punch the person who did this in the face.”) But the new book, from Really Big Coloring Books, Inc., may be the first to focus exclusively on the terrorist attacks and their aftermath. “The book was created with honesty, integrity, reverence, respect and does not shy away from the truth,” the publisher says on its Web site. “In this book you will see what happens to a terrorist who orders others to bomb our peace loving wonderful nation.” They add that parental guidance is suggested.

Should parents be worried about the graphic images, the underlying messages, or both? The publishers identify the book as a “graphic coloring novel,” which, as far as I can tell, means smaller pictures to color and a whole lot of text on each page. Above bin Laden’s startled face, there are four long paragraphs on the mission to hunt down and kill him, followed by a paragraph of editorializing:

Children, the truth is, these terrorist acts were done by freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists. These crazy people hate the American way of life because we are FREE and our society is FREE. We must be prepared to know and understand the truth. America is FREE. Ask your mother and father, your teacher, your preacher what this really means. What does it mean to be FREE? Why are we a FREE people? We are free to think, free to be honest, free to write, free to live as we wish. We are America. America does not hate other people in the world, but we love the world in which we live and will defend our way of life.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations has decried the book, saying that it maligns Muslims by never failing to pair them with words like “extremist” and “terrorist.” “All these caricatures could paint into the mind of a young person that perhaps all Muslims may be somewhat responsible for 9/11 or that Muslims themselves might be an enemy or a fifth column within the United States of America,” C.A.I.R. executive director Dawud Walid said in an interview. The publisher, Wayne Bell, responded by saying that, “He calls the book disgusting … but he should call the people in the book, the 19 terrorists, Osama bin Laden, he should call him disgusting. This is history. It is absolutely factual.”

Most of the coloring books in the Really Big Coloring Books, Inc., catalogue are fairly innocuous. There are a lot of religious ones (I wonder how I would color God!) and there’s standard coloring-book fare, like butterflies and zoo animals. And they aren’t entirely conservative—they’ve got one on President Obama. But they made headlines last year when they put out “The Tea Party Coloring Book for Kids,” which features a group of children engaging in commerce and harvesting what appears to be a money tree. Bell received death threats for that one, one saying that the letter-writer wanted to put him in a “chloroform headlock.”

The 9/11 book, meanwhile, has sold out its initial ten thousand print run. It remains to be seen how many were purchased for the novelty and how many will wind up in the hands of actual children, armed with Crayola 120 packs and ready to figure out exactly which crayon to use to color in the World Trade Center.

Illustration: Really Big Coloring Books, Inc.