Richard Edelman is the president and chief executive officer of Edelman, the largest independent global public relations firm. Edelman is an interesting company because of their heavy investment in Web 2.0 and especially blog technologies. They recently launched a blog portal to aggregate content published by their numerous corporate bloggers, including Richard Edelman and Steve Rubel.

Richard published a piece today concerning Tolerance and the Role of PR. In principle, I disagree with his comments, one in particular:

We should not simply excuse the perpetrators on the grounds of momentary lapses of judgment. Words matter, often as precursors to action or indicators of future behavior. We need to hold our public figures, whether actors, government officials or businesspeople, responsible for their statements. We should not be so quick to forgive or forget.

Do words really matter? Do claims to act necessarily correlate to action taken? We have asked favors of people who never satisfied our expectations. We’ve assigned tasks to people that were never completed. It’s human nature: people often say one thing and do another. I’m reasonably certain Richard can relate as nobody seriously involved with a business practice cannot have ever encountered goldbricks.

That said, words matter in certain contexts. A masked figure holding a pistol to your temple who demands your valuables uses words that matter. Words matter when context matters. Richard discusses a recent celebrity drunk-driving incident involving actor and director Mel Gibson, criticizing his reputation management practices as “a bit too cute” of a ploy. Compare the case of the hold-up thug with the case of a belligerent, middle-aged alcoholic entertainer. Which context matters?

Trick question. Both contexts matter; however, each context is relevant to certain people. In the former example, the people who are directly affected consist of a single person whereas in the latter example the people who are directly affected primarily consist of Jewish community activists.

Yet, the importance of each context is contrasted by the result of the claims to perform. The likelihood of that single person being murdered is far greater than the likelihood of Mel Gibson inciting a new wave of antisemitic persecution with a passive generalization. The case involving the hoodlum is obviously more significant and progressively more influential than the case involving “in-the-cuff” remarks by a Hollywood celebrity of dwindling popularity.

Were some people encouraged by Mel Gibson’s brief quip? Undoubtedly, but we should not forget that those people who are encouraged by hatred are actively searching for emotional support for their hatred regardless of whether that support is derived from Mel Gibson or tanks rolling around the West Bank. We must remember that these reasons for hatred are not causes of hatred; they’re usually symptoms of greater problems.