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Five of Shareef’s children are active-service military, and they have already experienced discrimination while in uniform, he said. “When you’re needed but you’re not made to feel comfortable, it’s going to be difficult for you to give 100 percent. . . . You are not going to excel at whatever you’re needed in. And we need everybody.”

“We need them, and they need us,” he said. “I don’t care how powerful we say we are as a military, we will never be able to fight the battles on our own.”

Trump’s picks have largely echoed the views of the president-elect himself, who at various points in the campaign called for religious tests for immigrants as well as surveillance of American mosques. Terrorism experts and human rights groups have warned that such rhetoric drives support for extremist groups by making Muslim citizens feel unwelcome in their own country.

“The danger is that they’re going to pass legislation that not only alienates Muslim countries on which we depend for our security, but also it may alienate American Muslims and push them in the direction of our enemies,” said Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.

Both Flynn and Sessions have dismissed criticisms of their views on Islam as oversimplifications. In his 2016 book, “The Field of Fight: How We Can Win the Global War Against Radical Islam and Its Allies,” Flynn distinguishes between radical Islamists and ordinary Muslims, though he at times resorts to harsh terms in describing the fight against the former. He calls Islam a “political ideology” disguised as a religion.