He's distinguishing between safe and unsafe languages, not between static and dynamic languages. The general mindset is that C++ can be faster than Java because

He's distinguishing between safe and unsafe languages, not between static and dynamic languages. The general mindset is that C++ can be faster than Java because it lets you do unsafe operations like pointer arithmetic and reinterpreting the raw bits from one type of data as another type, while Java requires you to go through (safe) interfaces or disallows those operations altogether.