Forget baseball cards. A 9/11 coloring book now comes with a complete set of terrorist trading cards. Would you want your teen trading Osama bin Laden for Yahya al-Libi?
A St. Louis-based publisher released an updated version of its controversial 9/11 graphic coloring book that now comes with a complete set of terrorist trading cards.
When Really Big Coloring Books, Inc., first released We Shall never Forget 9/11 to tie in with the anniversary of the September 11th terrorist attack, the 40-page book sparked criticism from the Muslim community.
We Shall never Forget 9/11, Volume II: The True Faces of Evil-Terror has a PG-13 rating and tells the complete story of 9/11. Kids can color in images of everything from the airplanes knocking down the Twin Towers to the moment before Osama Bin Laden was shot. The new edition comes with several pages of perforated trading cards depicting “the men, women and governments behind terror.”
Ramzi Yousef, 1993 World Trade Center bomber; Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, President of Iran; Abu Yahya al-Libi, a top al-Qaeda leader; and Osama bin Laden, founder of al-Qaeda are among the people featured on the cards.
When the coloring book first hit online stores last year, some Muslim groups felt it was reenforcing negative stereotypes that repeatedly damage the reputation of the Muslim American community.
Nearly all mentions of Muslims are accompanied by the words “extremists” or “terrorists,” Dawud Walid, Michigan representative for the Council on American Islamic Relations, pointed out to ABC News last fall. And in one instance jihadists are referred to as “freedom-hating radical Islamic Muslim extremists.”
“Little kids who pick up this book can have their perceptions colored by those images … it instills bias in young minds,” Walid told ABC.
Wayne Bell, publisher of Really Big Coloring Books, Inc., says the book isn’t meant to make a political statement or take sides. Bell says it was simply created to provide parents with a tool to explain the facts and what happened on September 11, 2001.
“We don’t candy coat it,” Bell told SFGate. “We just tell it the way it is. We don’t shy away from the truth.”
This is a hard book,” he adds. “It’s honest. It’s indifferent to political correctness.”
What makes the book politically incorrect? For one thing it refers to 9/11 as a war and some feel that tragedy is a more sensitive label.
“A hurricane is a tragedy,” Bell says. “9/11 isn’t a tragedy. It’s a war. And the guys killing our soldiers aren’t insurgents. They’re hardcore, death-bound terrorists.”
The book was created due to consumer demand. Bell owns the URL for coloringbook.com, where he sells hundreds of titles, and says every day people were typing “9/11” into the search box on his site.
Big Coloring Books has published titles for groups with wide-ranging views and on both sides of the political spectrum, from President Obama: An Activity & Workbook to the Tea Party Coloring Book for Kids. Bell says the Aging Gracefully Initiative Intergenerational Book, created in conjunction with the Muslim group Aga Kahn, was distributed to mosques all over the country.
We Shall never Forget 9/11 is considered a graphic coloring novel and 100 years ago they were a popular educational tool for kids to learn history. “Hiroshima. Nagasaki. These events were all depicted in graphic coloring novels,” Bell says. “With the advent of the Internet this tradition has been lost and we’re bringing it back.”
