Historical Dictionary of Terrorism Third Edition

84 • BLACK SEPTEMBER ORGANIZATIONmurder, citing the withholding of critical evidence by the prosecutionat the original trial. Brown, who converted to Sunni Islam upon hisrelease from prison, taking the name Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin, movedto Atlanta where he began a community service program to keep innercityyouth off drugs and where he became the leader of the CommunityMosque in the West End district in 1985. In March 2000 he became afugitive suspect following the shooting death of one sheriff’s deputyand the wounding of another, both of whom were serving an arrestwarrant in connection with a May 1999 traffic violation. In October2002 he was convicted for the murder and sentenced to life imprisonment;the Georgia Supreme Court unanimously upheld his convictionin May 2004 following an appeal of his sentence.While the militant image of the Panthers inspired fear in the public,in retrospect Panther violence appeared to be sporadic and reactiverather than a coherent tactic to foment a revolution. Nonetheless theBlack Panthers were the predecessors of the Black Liberation Army,which in turn, together with remnants of the Weather Underground,helped form the Revolutionary Armed Task Force, which continueda campaign of leftist revolutionary terrorism within the United Statesuntil 1986. According to Seale, at its height the Black Panthers had5,000 followers in 48 chapters, of whom 28 were killed in shoot-outswith police, along with 68 members injured and 14 police officerskilled. By 2002 at least eight members were still in prison. Sealeclaims that the Panthers also served over 200,000 schoolchildren hotbreakfasts and arranged for over a million sickle-cell-anemia tests.In 1989 a group calling itself the New Black Panther Party wasfounded by Malik Z. Shabbaz and advocated anti-Semitic and antiwhiteextremism. In October 2002 several of the original Panthers,including Seale, David Hilliard, Elaine Brown, and Newton’s widow,began legal proceedings against the group for using the originalgroup’s name, emblems, and photographs of its members withouttheir permission and also for defaming the name of the Black Panthersby associating them with the hate ideology of the new group.BLACK SEPTEMBER ORGANIZATION (BSO). The BSO wasa clandestine group created by al Fatah in December 1971 for thelimited purpose of avenging the suppression and expulsion of thePalestine Liberation Organization (PLO) from Jordan during the“Black September” of 1970. On 6 September 1970 the Popular