Villains, Victims, Labels and Euphemisms: An Analysis of Al Jazeera Terror Terminology Variation by Event and Audience Abstract As terrorism is inseparable from ideology, it comes to no surprise ideology affects terror reporting. News agency ideology is often considered as a homogeneous whole that produces a consistent, reliable and predictable bias. However as ideology arises from the churning confluence of many divergent political, nationalistic, cultural, and religious influences, consistency is more often situational rather than universal. News reporting agencies must be responsive to the ideological perspectives of their patrons and their audiences. Such ideological sensitivity has many manifestations. This work examines the situational variations in ideological perspective as expressed by lexical selection exhibited by Al Jazeera in coverage of three terror venues; Iraq, Palestine, and most recently India, in their Arabic language editions. The comparative analysis contained within this work reveals lexicological variations and inconsistency from one venue to another that result from the conflicting ideological demands of the intended audiences as well as the news networks governmental and non-governmental patrons. The comparative analysis of this work incorporates elements of Critical Discourse Analysis - The Theory of Semantic Macrostructures and Theory of Ideology both by van Dijk, as well as the Discourse-Historical Approach of Wodak. Semantic Microstructure theory examines the structure of the work in order to illuminate the internal considerations active at the levels of writing and editing. Van Dijk's theories are applied to examine the cultural, social, nationalistic, political, and ideological factors affecting news coverage of these three terror venues. Wodak's approach expands the analysis with consideration of historical and political background of the researcher and the newspapers under consideration. This combination of theoretical elements constitutes a basis for Comparative Arabic discourse analysis with a focus on socio-linguistic analysis of text and rhetoric, rather than the more common functional Systemic Linguistic analysis or grammar theory considerations.