U.S. response to Chinese weather balloon "bizarre military stunt": Al Jazeera columnist

DOHA, Feb. 27 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. response to a Chinese weather balloon ignores its own track record of "global surveillance and bombing," said an opinion piece published on the website of Al Jazeera.

The U.S. shooting down the Chinese weather balloon in its airspace is a "bizarre military stunt" that has been performed on the world stage "on purpose," columnist Belen Fernandez wrote in an article published on the website of Al Jazeera on Thursday.

The U.S. reaction is "pretty preposterous" given its own "stellar track record of surveilling everyone and everything in the world," including "decades of particularly aggressive spying against China."

The United States faces many problems that are "more existentially perilous than a balloon off the coast of South Carolina," such as the lack of a functioning healthcare or education system and mass shootings, wrote Fernandez.

She added that the panic about the Chinese balloon also "discounts all the literal ariel terror that is made in the U.S. -- from bombing and strafing Afghanistan and Iraq to saturating the heavens with armed drones."

The "made-in-U.S. panic" fuels "an atmosphere of bellicose Sinophobia," she added.

On Feb. 4, the United States shot down a Chinese weather balloon that had blown off course with a 400,000-U.S. dollar missile. China has rejected the U.S. claim that it was a "spy balloon" and said the entry of the Chinese civilian weather balloon was an entirely unintended, unexpected and isolated event caused by force majeure.