To my eyes just having generics and hiding away pointers and vtables make them very high level, but I think my argument was more about what is coming with the language (aka their standard libraries) and I've definitely seen people ignore the available libraries, even in python.
C: "See, you're doing it wrong! I've got a really lean standard library!"
Java: "Ah, so you just focus on the basics. You have a dictionary structure? That's pretty basic."
C: "...no."