The post was written by one of the people who worked on Java, not somebody trying to impress you by associating Java with some language you like better. Are you trying to say Patrick Naughton is just making this up?
Gosling and others have been making claims of this sort for years, and yes, I do believe that they do so with the hope of improving their language's reputation, and further, to give their users the impression that they aren't missing out on anything by sticking with Java; that Gosing et al. studied the cream of the language crop when designing Java, took the good parts and left the cruft behind, so why bother trying anything else?
The author also cites Goslings "lots of experience" with Smalltalk.
"In any event the claim is the design is influenced by Obj-C not that it is actually just like Obj-C, a distinction you seem to have trouble making."
The influence is not sufficient to justify that claim any more than Java's garbage collection would justify its designers in describing Java as "Lispy" or "Lisp-like."
Tell a C++ compiler engineer to make language "C++ minus templates and multiple inheritance plus GC" and you'll probably end up very close to Java.
What do you tell an objective-C compiler engineer to get Java? "Start with obc-c and ..."?
Maybe it's convergent independent evolution, but if obc-c is a branch to the left from C and C++ is a branch to the right, then claiming that Java comes from obj-c means Java must have pulled a very hard right early in its development.