I see no evidence that Perl is particularly faster than the other dynamic languages, either. Ruby was often slower for a good long time, but seems to have caught up to rough parity. CPython generally has a slight (but in practice irrelevant) advantage over it.

You know, the picture becomes to come into focus to me. I suspect due to the prevalence of the saying "Languages don't have performance, only implementations do" and people constantly slagging on benchmarks without thought, simply reflexively, and probably helped by a healthy dose of both fanboyism and instinctive revulsion to fanboyism, programmers are apparently nearly completely incapable of having a reasonable discussion about which languages are faster than other, at what tasks, under what circumstances.

Well, that's a pity, because there is such a discussion to be had, and a lot of people are getting hurt because of their inability to get good information on this topic, and consequently making perfectly-avoidable bad decisions. Absolute statements are hard to come by, sure, but there are engineeringly-useful guidelines that you can discover if you examine the problem space.