A fringe religious zealot from Brooklyn admitted to The Post on Tuesday that he touched off the controversial face-off outside the Lincoln Memorial by viciously berating a group of Catholic high school students from Kentucky.

“The word of God — it sparked it all,” said the man, who identified himself as “Chief Ephraim Israel” of the House of Israel.

“They seen what they’ve done. They’ve been told. I believe they are from Kentucky. They’ve never been spoken like that to by a black or Hispanic guy in their lives. The words of God.”

He added: “It was piercing. Their souls was getting ripped. They were catching darts and ninja stars all into their soul.”

Israel was caught on video verbally attacking both Native American activists and the students from Covington Catholic High School for more than an hour on Friday before activist Nathan Phillips appeared and began chanting and beating on a drum.

A clip of Phillips standing toe-to-toe with Covington Catholic High School student Nick Sandmann — who smiled silently as his schoolmates mockingly chanted along with Phillips — later went viral and initially sparked outrage at the kids’ conduct.

During an interview in a Bedford-Stuyvesant apartment, Israel defended the outrageous insults he hurled at the students, whom he at one point called “a bunch of f—-ts made out of incest.”

Israel said the students tried in vain to shut him up by loudly reciting what Sandmann has called “school spirit chants.”

“They started doing their chants, so I was cutting into them. I called them dogs. They sounded like dogs,” he said.

Israel also said the Native American activists “were trying to stop everything” and “de-escalate the situation.”

“They actually interrupted what we was teaching,” he said.

“At the time, the kids took a position. They was all on one knee like the offensive line and the defensive line. And it looked like they was going to rush us and that’s when [Phillips] came.”

“I wish he didn’t. We was still teaching. We had so much more to go,” he said.

Israel said he’s 36 years old, of Puerto Rican heritage and works as a porter. He said he’s been a member of the House of Israel — often referred to as “Black Israelites” — since his teens.

The group’s members are infamous in New York City for publicly preaching inflammatory rhetoric in Times Square and elsewhere.

The House of Israel is among 233 black-nationalist hate groups identified by the Southern Poverty Law Center, which monitors extremists active in the United States.

It’s part of the Hebrew Israelite movement, whose members believe themselves to be descendants of the biblical 12 tribes of Israel, according to the SPLC.

A 2008 report from the SPLC said extremist Hebrew Israelites “have a long, strange list of enemies,” including white people, “fraudulent” Jews, Asians, continental Africans and gay people.