Lesson in how to use irrelevant information to attack your opponent

http://www.catholic.net/index.php?option=zenit&id=28914

Apparently Edward Pentin’s best explanation as to why Christopher Hitchens wants to arrest the Pope is to dig into his personal life. It’s nothing more than a pointless attack that has no relevance to the matter at hand. A curious tactic considering that before he begins the attack on Hitchens he gives a rather solid legal argument for why the Pope cannot be arrested. Here’s what he has to say on Hitchens:

“But few people have questioned why he holds such strong views against the Church and religious belief in general. A look at his past, however, offers some clues.

Hitchens is a former Leninist who describes himself as an atheist, an -- "antitheist" -- and a believer in the philosophical views of the Enlightenment. As a child, he says he was a "navy brat," the son of Royal Navy Commander, who rebelled against his father's conservative attitudes. His mother was of Polish-Jewish descent, a woman of a more liberal and cosmopolitan mind, to whom he was closer.

From the age of seven his parents sent him away to various boarding schools, and from the ages of 13 and 17 he attended a Methodist boarding school in Cambridge. Religion seemed to figure very little, except in a perceived negative sense of obligation and discipline. He went to Oxford University to study philosophy, ending up with a third class degree.

During school and university, Hitchens, a child of the 60s, experienced a life of decadence and immoral behavior, which he struggled to abandon. In a soon-to-be-published autobiography, excerpted recently in the London Times, he describes in some detail what he calls the "sadomasochism" he experienced at school, participation in lewd encounters at a young age with fellow pupils of the same sex, further homosexual encounters at university, and his attraction to Trotskyism.

But perhaps his loathing for Christianity can also be partly attributed to his close relationship with his mother (he was her eldest and, according to him, favored son) and tragic events in 1973.

Aged 24 and working for the New Statesman, a left-wing English magazine, Hitchens discovered that his mother had been having an affair with a "defrocked" Anglican vicar. After hiding the affair for sometime, Yvonne Hitchens suddenly disappeared with her lover without telling her husband. A couple of days later, Hitchens read media reports that she had been found dead in an Athens hotel room along with her lover. The two, it transpired, had died in a suicide pact. The Anglican vicar of Athens conducted their funeral, "making no attempt to disguise his distaste at burying a suicide," according to a May 2008 interview in Prospect magazine.

Hitchens maintains his mother's death hasn't shaped him, nor played a larger significant role in the way he has developed his beliefs and attitudes.

Elsewhere he has spoken of his own "innate" dissenting character, and his aversion to becoming a "party-liner" -- something he learned from his Trotsky days. His polemical writings partly derive from a quote of George Orwell, a favorite author of his, that the prime responsibility of a writer is "being able to tell people what they did not wish to hear."”

Leave it to a writer for a Catholic website to present an interest in the left and flirtations with homosexuality as possible motives for a hatred of religion. Losing a mother to suicide would be devastating though that alone wouldn’t make a man wake up one day and decide that religion is irrational.

“Yet it helps if the polemics don't backfire. Hitchens was an outspoken advocate of the 2003 Iraq War, which some international lawyers deemed illegal. A case could arguably be made, therefore, to have himself brought to the ICC for war crimes on the grounds of being a leading cheerleader for an illegal war. After all, he now seems to be a keen proselytizer for international law, at least when it suits his ideological goals.”

Hitchens early support for the Iraq War was misplaced and foolish. However, to arrest someone for being a vocal supporter of the war would be a violation of free speech in the highest degree. We’d have to throw the entire cast of Fox News any politician who voiced support for it as well (even if they didn’t have a plan in handling it) along with all of those American patriots who believe it is America’s duty to invade a non-threatening country.