CAIRO, Egypt - President Bush doesn’t need to capture Osama bin Laden, he needs to talk to him, the terrorist leader’s son, Omar bin Laden, told TODAY co-host Matt Lauer on Tuesday.

Wearing a black, leather biker jacket, black polo shirt and faded blue jeans and with his long hair pulled back in tightly braided dreadlocks, Omar bin Laden, 26, spoke via satellite from Cairo with his 52-year-old British wife at his side. The fourth-oldest son of the world’s most wanted man has recently been in the media, saying he wants to use his name to be an “ambassador for peace” between Islam and the West. While he has renounced his father’s methods, he does not call him a terrorist.

“They do some meeting and talk together,” he said in heavily accented English of Bush and Osama bin Laden, suggesting that a meeting could be facilitated by other world political and religious leaders. “Find the middle ground between everybody – that’s my goal, to find it for every civilian people,” he said.

Lauer expressed profound doubt that George Bush would ever sit down at a conference table with the man who inspired the 9/11 attacks. But Omar bin Laden’s wife of one year, the former Jane Felix-Browne who is now known as Zaina Alsabah, compared the world’s most wanted man to Sinn Fein leader Gerry Adams, who over the course of 30 years went from a man held without trial by England to a member of Parliament.

“Gerry Adams was classed as a terrorist,” she said. “The IRA killed an awful lot of people. Yet, they talked. They sat down at a table and now Gerry Adams is an MP. Why can’t we get something like that with Osama?”

It is an imperfect analogy. Adams was a political leader of Irish Republicans; Osama bin Laden is an open sponsor of terrorism. And Adams has been involved in the political process for decades.

‘Peace isn’t going to come with bombs’
But, Zaina and Omar bin Laden said, the world would not necessarily be safer if Osama bin Laden were dead. At the same time, they do not know for sure that he is alive, Omar bin Laden last having seen or spoken to his father eight years ago, when he left an al-Qaida camp in Afghanistan to pursue a career in business.

“There’s not going to be any peace unless people talk,” Zaina said. “Peace isn’t going to come with bombs. Peace isn’t going to come with fighting. To arrest Osama, it’s not going to solve anything. You take Osama bin Laden away, and what are you going to get? You might get something a hell of a lot worse. That’s what we’re afraid of.”

“The world has chance now to find new solution, to find new chance for peace because still my father alive,” Omar bin Laden said. “If my father die, there will be a lot of people say, ‘Now I am head of al-Qaida.’ You will find thousands of al-Qaida everywhere.”

He said he has been moved to speak out, “not for my father, not for President Bush, just for civilian people dying every day, some in Palestine, some in Iraq, some in Afghanistan. Why, why, why should civilian people die?”

In an earlier interview with The Associated Press, he said there is a better way to defend Islam than al-Qaida’s militancy. He’s trying to organize a 3,000-mile horse race across North Africa to draw attention to the cause of peace.

“It’s about changing the ideas of the Western mind. A lot of people think Arabs — especially the bin Ladens, especially the sons of Osama — are all terrorists. This is not the truth,” Omar told AP last Friday at a cafe in one of Cairo’s new shopping malls.

Trained at al-Qaida camp
Omar, the fourth eldest of Osama bin Laden’s 19 children, lived with his father in Sudan, then moved with him to Afghanistan when Khartoum forced out the al-Qaida leader in 1996.

Omar says he trained in Afghanistan at an al-Qaida camp, but in 2000 he decided there must be another way and he left his father, returning to his homeland Saudi Arabia.

“I don’t want to be in that situation to just fight. I like to find another way, and this other way may be like we do now, talking,” he said in English. He suggested his father did not oppose his leaving — and Alsabah interjected that Omar was courageous in breaking away, but neither elaborated.

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