The War Resisters League has awarded Asma Mohammed its 2012 Peace Award, given in the past to activists including Bayard Rustin, Bob Moses and Jeanette Rankin. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at the first WRL Peace Award event in 1958.

Mohammed’s refusal of the tear gas shipment from the Port of Wilmington, N.C., came in the wake of unprecedented use of tear gas use against protesters around Tahrir Square during the “battle of Mohamed Mahmoud," where dozens died directly from inhalation of the gas during a six-day assault by Egyptian riot police beginning on November 19, 2011. Mohammed's refusal triggered the formation of the General Independent Union of Port Workers, Egypt’s first post-revolution port worker union, which started in Suez but quickly spread across Egypt as labor activism skyrocketed following the uprising that began in January 2011.

“Gull gliding against/gray-silver autumn sky/sees a vast miasma of greed/slowly encompass our entire planet …”

Dennis Brutus, once a prisoner of apartheid and now a voice for (among other causes) the environment, read his poem “Gull” via video to a packed meeting room at New York’s Judson Memorial Church Friday evening, September 18.