First of all, no one is hating anyone for their religious beliefs, just hating the religions themselves. Secondly, conflating religious belief and ethnicity is simply a mistake. Sometimes a dangerous one as with the "Islamophobia" nonsense going on in Europe right now.
No one, least of all Christopher Hitchens, promoted or is promoting hating a person for what they believed, but that certainly doesn't preclude you from hating the belief system itself. For instance, I find Islam repellent, backward, hateful, and dangerous to modernity and freedom. I'm not going to burn down a Mosque because of it though. I have similar views one practically every religion, to varying degrees, and the same, separate, view about the adherents to said religions.
About the only religion I don't have a problem with is Jainism, and mostly I just feel sorry for them.