Do you suppose it's okay for a manager to say this to a person?

"You can use your talents like Ghandi, or you can use them like Hitler."

It seems a very unfortunate choice of words at best and a maliciously cruel choice of words if the person they are speaking to happens to belong to one of the categories of people that were targeted in the holocaust. Which the person on the receiving end of this comment was. Was the manager just oblivious to the objectionable nature of her words? Or was she trying to tell her report exactly what how she felt?